There isn’t much news in most community newspapers these days. While it’s common to blame the internet for the woes of newspapers, the crisis in the news business is also a symptom of the faltering growth of our fossil-fueled economy.
Our local newspaper carried a headline this week that caught my eye: “Metroland papers in Durham well read”. The self-congratulatory article shared a number of factoids from a Metroland-commissioned survey. For example: “readership topped 82 per cent” (with “readership” defined generously as meaning a person had “read” at least one of the past four issues of the newspaper and/or its flyers). Or this: the typical issue “is kept in the house for an average of almost four days” (which makes perfect sense, since recycling day varies through the region, but on each street the recycling truck comes once a week).
Metroland is a subsidiary of the Toronto Star (the largest newspaper in Canada by circulation). Metroland is responsible for more than 100 small-market papers in Ontario, including Clarington This Week in my town.
Since moving to Clarington a year ago I’ve read every issue of Clarington This Week, looking especially for news of local politics, economic development and planning. Alas, this is not one of the paper’s strong suits, and I studied the news for months before learning the secret of when the municipal council holds its meetings.
For that, I do not blame local journalists. They work in chronically understaffed newsrooms, and if they wrote up each significant development in municipal politics, management would be hard-pressed to free up any space to print the stories.
Let’s be frank: in community newspapers actual journalism is an essential but minor component of the much larger business of distributing ads, especially ads in the form of flyers.
The most recent issue of our local paper, for example is 48 pages. Measuring the amount of news coverage (defined as all photos, articles, and headlines which are not paid advertising) I found that the newspaper itself is just under 30% news, and just over 70% ads. That makes 14.3 pages of news.
But the flyers total 180 pages (and this at a slow time of year for retail; in the month before Christmas the bundle is far thicker). The newspaper and ads together are 228 pages, so the 14.3 pages of news take up just 6% of the total package.
“Free” media and the shrinking news hole
The most recent edition of Clarington This Week is hard to find among all its flyers.
How did the news get buried in an avalanche of ads? The shift to 100% advertising-supported business models marked an inflection point in a process that’s been going on for decades.
Full disclosure: in my own small way I was an accomplice in this process. As a managing editor at the end of the 1990’s, I helped shift a subscription-supported small-town newspaper to 100% advertiser-funded, “free” distribution. For this misdeed I expect I will be reincarnated at least once as some lowly scavenger – perhaps a carp, or a dung beetle, or a homo economicus.
There was a clear business case for free distribution. For many years, the proportion of newspaper revenues from subscription fees had been decreasing while the proportion of revenue from ads had increased. By the 1990s, subscription newspapers typically received only about 20% of their income from subscriptions – basically, subscriptions just covered the cost of delivery, while ad revenue covered all the rent, the printing costs, and the staff salaries.
Most advertisers were happier to pay for ads that reached all local residents, not just subscribers. For small-community newspapers, in particular, the shift to free distribution meant more ad revenue, which could easily replace the diminishing income that previously came from subscription fees.
There was one underlying condition: if advertisers funded ever-greater proportions of the cost of newspapers, they had to sell ever more stuff to make their ad expenditures worthwhile. Through the lifetimes of everyone working in the newspaper industry today, this trend was reliable enough that we didn’t have to think about it, until recently.
Almost continuous economic growth for several generations has lead many people to regard continuous economic growth as the natural order of things. But a minority among economists points out that continuous, exponential growth is not the natural order, but instead is a natural impossibility. They further note the past century of rapid economic growth coincides neatly with the rapid exploitation of most of the world’s easily accessible fossil fuels. In this view, the explosive growth in consumer spending for the past century is in large part an artifact of what James Howard Kunstler calls the “fossil fuel fiesta”.
From “Shifts in Newspaper Advertising Expenditures and their Implications for the Future of Newspapers”, by Robert G. Picard, July 2008, accessed from academia.edu (click graphic for link to article)
For the past 60 years, newspaper ad expenditure growth tracked pretty closely with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth. And as long as consumers bought more of the stuff that businesses advertised, these businesses could spend more on ads, and newspapers could reduce or even eliminate subscription fees and thereby boost circulation. Gradually, consumers began to think of news and information as “free”.
When internet information providers started to grow in the late 1990s, most adopted this “free” distribution model. That in turn made this model less successful for newspapers. Total ad expenditures continued to rise, but they had to be shared among more media. Ads got much cheaper, and newspapers found it increasingly difficult to price ads high enough to finance journalists’ (diminishing) salaries. When the effects of the Great Recession of 2008 combined with competition from the internet, the crisis for newspapers intensified. The “news hole” – the space left over for news after the paid ads were slotted in – continued to shrink, as newspapers filled up with lower-priced ads which barely covered production costs.
A blizzard of flyers
Back to our local story. At the turn of the millennium when I managed a small-town newspaper, a news hole of 50% or more of the newspaper was still common. And although flyer distribution was becoming a significant sideline for many newspapers, the volume of flyers was still small compared to the size of the newspapers.
In the paper I worked for, we prided ourselves on keeping the news hole above 50%, and bundling only a couple of flyers with each issue. We felt we were still primarily in the news business, instead of primarily in the ad distribution business.
How quaint that seems now. Over the past 15 years, retailers have been increasingly reliant on volume sales of low-profit-margin junk. A half-page ad inside a newspaper doesn’t suffice – each supermarket or big-box retailer wants multiple pages of their ads landing in consumers’ homes each and every week. (Those 75 different flavours of potato chips don’t sell themselves.)
So they’ve demanded ever-cheaper flyer distribution, and newspapers have been in no position to turn them down.
We reached the point where people referred to a local newspaper as just a wrapper for flyers – but we’re far beyond that now. With many community newspapers the pack of flyers is far too thick to fit inside the paper.
The result: newspapers like the one I received last Thursday, with 6% news, 94% ads.
Is the end nigh?
As unsatisfactory as the current media business is to an avid reader, it is also unsustainable. Whether the news provider is Google or Facebook or the local newspaper, providing “free” information only works as long as readers and viewers keep buying more of the stuff that is being advertised.
When the long trend of economic growth stalls, advertisers will no longer be able to fund media. I’m among those who think this change is already well underway.
The economic turmoil of the past eight years will upend many business models that used to sound prudent, back when abundant and easily-accessible fossil fuels helped us to produce and consume more stuff every year.
Top photo: a single issue of a local newspaper underneath all its ad flyers, on the backdrop of the parking lot of the vacant Target store in Bowmanville, Ontario.
