Who will mourn local newspapers? By John Gapper, Financial Times They say that journalists prefer bad news to good news. There is plenty of that close to home. This is becoming a terrible week for the US newspaper industry. On Monday, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy. The New York Times Company followed by saying it might mortgage its Renzo Piano-designed headquarters building by Times Square to reduce debt. The recession has turned the long, slow decline of newspapers into a brisk fall. On Tuesday, I dropped into a UBS investor conference in New York to catch Gary Pruitt, chief executive of the McClatchy newspaper chain (parent of the Kansas City Star), calling its results �lousy.�At this rate, US newspapers will be lucky to make it to the weekend. Many American journalists, facing job losses and the death of an industry they loved, regard it as a tragedy not just for them but for society. They fear that television, radio and blogs can never replace what newspapers provided for readers. Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, put the point succinctly to National Public Radio earlier this month: �Good journalism does not come cheap. And, therefore, you�re not going to find a lot of blogs or non-profit websites that are going to build a Baghdad bureau.� Up to a point, Lord Keller. The failure of papers will deprive US readers � and those in countries where similar forces are at work � of plenty of useful information. But, let us face it, the industry also plays host to an immense amount of duplication and self-indulgence. The internet brought trouble for regional and city papers not only because it gave an outlet to bloggers, and broke the monopoly they had on classified and display advertising, but because it let Philadelphians, for example, peruse publications other than the Inquirer. There are things you can only learn about Philadelphia from the Inquirer, or Chicago from the Tribune, or Miami from the Herald. If they went away, they would also take with them a check on local abuses of political power, as the phone-tapped desire of Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, to get his critics on the Tribune fired shows. Nor is it obvious that such coverage could be produced by internet sites instead. In theory, information about local events can be just as efficiently distributed online as in print � in some ways, better. In practice, papers� dominance of local print advertising brought them a revenue base that is unlikely to be replicated. This week, I had a chat with Joel Kramer, the founder of MinnPost, a news and analysis internet site devoted to politics and civic affairs in Minneapolis and St Paul. He was formerly publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which has cut jobs as it gets financially squeezed. MinnPost is among a new breed of non-profit sites, including Voice of San Diego and ProPublica, which are trying to fill the gap left by the decline of city papers. He raised $1.5m (including $250,000 from himself) to start the site, which employs six editors and pays freelancers to write. It does some valuable work. But Mr Kramer admits that it functions more as a �complement� to the Star Tribune and its rival, the Pioneer Press, than as a substitute. He says that it tries to add depth and analysis to stories that are already in the news more than dig up news itself. As Mr Keller says, reporting is expensive. It requires someone to get on the phone, gather information, balance conflicting views of what has just occurred, and present the result. Papers have done this basic work for cities and states for so long that we take it for granted. Other aspects of US journalism will not, however, be missed. Some things, such as sports scores and weather forecasts, can be collated in a more timely and user-friendly way online. In addition, there is a swath of national and foreign coverage that is no longer needed. There used to be a logic to the Chicago Tribune or the Miami Herald having large Washington bureaus and even foreign correspondents. People who lived in those places could not access The New York Times or The Washington Post online and relied instead on the local paper. These days, they can do so free, which eliminates the need for a lot of coverage to be duplicated. Aggregation sites such as Google News have shone a harsh spotlight on the overlap and repetition in national coverage in hundreds of newspapers. I am sure US citizens would lose something if fewer papers or wire services covered national affairs. But would it really be insufficient for society if five or six organizations (including Reuters and Bloomberg) competed to cover, for example, the Federal Reserve? I doubt it. The question for national and international reporting is not whether city papers survive but whether news organizations such as The New York Times do. Clearly, if they did not, and blogs were left alone to provide coverage of Washington and Iraq, there would be a problem. The honest answer is: we do not know. The New York Times, with its thriving online readership and global clout, seems in better shape than The New York Times Company, which has been indifferently managed by the Sulzberger family. A change of ownership might fix that. My working assumption, in more ways than one, is that consolidation � or, more accurately, eradication � of local newspapers will strengthen the editorial position of the remaining elite: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Financial Times etc. I also assume that this elite will find some way to cover its costs. Here�s hoping, anyway. Link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9d8af36-c6ec-11dd-97a5-000077b07658.html
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