The Standard-Examiner Thumbs its Nose at its Public Service Obligation

Our home town newspaper breaks precedent, and charges fees for the publication of neighborhood caucus locations for the first time ever

By Curmudgeon

For a good... and chilling... overview of the economic conditions under which daily newspapers are operating these days, check out this story in today's NY Times.

From the story:

Critics of newspapers say that part of the problem is that the industry has lost its ability to surprise. Tell that to the guys who have just bought in. “The news business is something worse than horrible. If that’s the future, we don’t have much of a future,” Sam Zell, who bought the Tribune Company last year, said recently in The Baltimore Sun. “I’m an optimist, but it is very hard to be positive about what’s going on,” said Brian P. Tierney, who bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News in 2006. “The near term and medium term at the paper is more negative than what we expected,” said OhSang Kwon of Avista Capital Partners, which bought The Minneapolis Star-Tribune in late 2006.

These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.

And

According to the “State of the News Media” report, the extensive cuts across the industry will cripple any potential rebound as newspapers lose authority and franchises in their markets. Mr. Appert remains confident that quality newspapers with a good grip on their audiences will find a way to remain in business through a combination of online and off-line revenues, even if the historically high margins will appear only in the rearview mirror.

John Morton, a longtime newspaper analyst, is more pessimistic. “The industry is meeting these challenges by cutting, by reducing the news hole and the people who fill it,” he said. “Newspapers have lived through recessions before and come back strong,” he added. “My worry is that when things do turn around, they will be coming back in an environment that is more competitive than ever because of the Internet, and that after all these cuts, they will have less stature, less product quality and less talent — all of the things that they need to compete.”

Critics of what the SE does [and I am often one] should, in fairness, keep in mind the economic conditions dailies operate under these days, and should recognize at least that the SE has found a way to earn a profit for its owners in conditions under which many other papers continue to lose money. As with most things, survival is job one.

This in no way diminishes one iota the paper's obligation to be the best possible daily under the circumstances in which it operates or its obligation to fulfill certain public service obligations any paper has, regardless of profit considerations [e.g. not to let its editorial positions, or worse, its news coverage, be dictated by its major advertisers, for example].

The SE failed its public service obligation when it began, this election for the first time, charging for printing locations of caucus sites. As Mr. Trentelman's article on the front page this morning makes clear, the caucuses are a fundamental part of the election process in Utah. As such, caucus locations should be printed by the SE as a public service, as polling stations for elections are.

And the SE should be ashamed of itself for not putting Mr. Trentelman's article up on its free access web page. It comes under the heading of public service too. Or should.

I'll cut the SE some slack on matters like depth and frequency of coverage for Ogden political matters on grounds of financial constraints, the fact that most of its readers are not in Ogden, and similar bean-counter concerns. They matter. Newspapers that go bust don't benefit the community in any way. But the paper gets no slack at all when, within those constraints, it fails to meet the standards of public service and quality work it ought to meet. And that its readers, in the city and out, ought to insist that it meet.