By Menachem Wecker
On Feb. 25, Gannett announced its intention to sell The Honolulu Advertiser, a 130,000 circulation daily founded in 1856, to rival paper, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, a 55,000 circulation daily reported to be losing $40,000 a day. According to reports, Gannett is also offering Oahu Publications, which owns the Star-Bulletin, $40 million to take the Advertiser off its hands.
“It looks like a consolidation will result in massive layoffs at the Advertiser (virtually everyone) and the Hawaiian Islands will lose its strongest journalistic voice,” says Michael Freedman, executive director of GW’s Global Media Institute.
Mr. Freedman, professor of media and public affairs, was a speaker at the conference NewsMorphosis 2.0: How the Transformation of our News Media is Transforming our Society on March 18 in Honolulu.
Some conference attendees seemed resigned to the fact that the Advertiser will disappear, while some younger people did not seem to care, because “newspapers are dead anyway,” says Mr. Freedman.
In his remarks, Mr. Freedman took the stance that good journalism – no matter what the platform – is absolutely necessary, and that journalism requires leadership. “I suggested that the people of Honolulu not go gently into that good night as they lose their number one newspaper,” he says.
Mr. Freedman began his remarks by reading from the Advertiser’s mission statement, which included goals like “being a vigilant partner in helping the Islands shape their future,” providing “a voice for all of the community,” reflecting “a love and understanding of this place and its people” and, perhaps most ambitiously, “to be Hawaii’s newspaper.” Yet, on Feb. 25, the newsroom staff was informed that “from a fiduciary responsibility standpoint” to the shareholders, it was the “right thing to do” to sell the paper.
“Welcome to the 21st century, where journalistic idealism meets fiduciary responsibility to shareholders,” Mr. Freedman said. “This morning, the future of a newspaper that has served this community and all of Hawaii since 1856 – an entity that has been part of the fabric of this community, part of its heart and soul – is now in doubt. Perhaps it will survive and thrive. The odds are not in its favor.”
According to Mr. Freedman, newspaper readers do not seem to be as concerned about the transformation of journalism as they ought to be. “It has likely not hit home yet to most people that one day soon in some of our cities we may be without credible coverage of our local politicians, schools, businesses and the police and fire departments,” said Mr. Freedman. “And it goes without saying that credible, local investigative journalism could disappear in many cities.”
At stake in the decline of newspapers, according to Mr. Freedman, is a reduction in “the quantity of quality content.”
Most newspaper readers have not needed to understand how exactly a service like the Associate Press works, says Mr. Freedman, so they may not realize that the AP, the world’s largest news gathering organization, is so financially dependent on the newspapers that print its content. If the AP struggles to put out regular content, online aggregators will lose their most important source of information.
Even if new and social media can reach numbers of readers that rival respected news organizations, recent events like the Iranian elections have demonstrated that people still need to turn to entities they trust like the AP, CNN and major network news divisions and newspapers. In the coverage of the elections in Iran, social media posts represented “a series of flashing lights,” said Mr. Freedman, but “it was hard, if not impossible, to see the big picture from the individual postings.”
“To those in the news business, this is what still separates ‘pajama journalists’ and ‘citizen journalists’ from news gathering organizations,” said Mr. Freedman. “And in this digital democracy, we want to strive to achieve a tower of strength – not a Tower of Babel.”
Ironically, the “magic potion” of “the new business model” that just about every newspaper in the country is seeking may be right under its nose, according to Mr. Freedman. That Holy Grail comes with a price tag.
“We were told that consumers would not pay for television when it was free for the price of an antenna on your roof. Today, 62.6 million Americans pay for basic cable. We were told nobody would pay for radio as long as it’s free. Today, 20 million people have paid subscriptions to Sirius-XM Satellite Radio,” Mr. Freedman said. “Today we are told that virtually nobody will pay for online news content. Yet, the number of paid subscribers for the WallStreetJournal.com is 1.063 million!”
Instead of seeking new business models, maybe the dire state of journalism today calls for new leadership.
A good place to look for this leadership, according to Mr. Freedman, is Edward R. Murrow, “the patron saint of broadcast news.”
“This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends,” said Mr. Murrow in a 1958 address to the Radio Television News Directors Association, “Otherwise it is merely lights and wires in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television can be useful.”
Mr. Murrow’s words still apply today, said Mr. Freedman. “Today, we have at our fingertips more information than Edward R. Murrow could have ever imagined,” he says. “And while the sheer volume seems sometimes to threaten to swallow us whole, in this cacophony of voices, there is a beautiful diversity and the promise of not merely 15 minutes of fame, but of deeper connections across a global divide.”