JOURNALISM’S FUNERAL MARCH LED BY CORPORATE VULTURES

Eons ago, I covered the Minnesota Legislature for the St. Cloud Daily Times. It was approximately 1970, and I was paid $1.45 an hour, the then prevailing minimum wage. Thanks to my parents, I was able to pay for my Greyhound Bus trips to and from the Capitol in St. Paul. The newspaper had been in the hands of a local family for decades. The publisher was a miserly old Dickensian character who deeply resented having to shell out money for a news operation. One day, I was chatting with a coworker who sold ads for the paper when Scrooge staggered up to us, moderately anesthetized by a long martini lunch. He slapped the ad guy on the back and slurred, “asset”. He poked me in the chest and said, “liability”. That was pretty much his business plan.

Little did I know then that those were the good old days of journalism. Owning a newspaper was a license to print money. Advertisers had few viable alternatives for marketing their wares back then. The formula was simple: subscribers read the papers for the news and then stumbled onto the ads. The result was newspaper profit margins ranging from 30-something to 40-something percent. Scrooge wouldn’t pay my expenses to cover the legislature because that would diminish his profits. Besides, he knew he could get the work on the cheap because I wanted the experience and the story clips to get a better job on a larger paper. As a result of this capital-labor symbiosis, he got rich, I got hired by the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and more importantly, people in St. Cloud got to read about what their legislative representatives were up to.

Those days are so gone. The once idealistic, if naïve, illusion that for-profit journalism is a calling, a search for the truth, a check on those in power, has been brutally shattered by sheer, unbridled greed. It’s capitalism run amuck. Yes, the Internet knocked newspapers for a loop. Ad revenue plummeted. Pages, stories and jobs were eliminated. But for the most part, these media companies struggled to survive, to reinvent news delivery on multiple platforms, to find some way to make their product – journalism – relevant and vital.

Then the hedge funds took over. Newspapers across the country have been gobbled up by vulture capitalist companies for the sole purpose of sucking all remaining value out of them, and then letting these once vital community assets die or go bankrupt. Their business objective is the direct opposite of viability. They just want to pick the bones, sell off the real estate, fire upwards of 90 percent of the journalists. It’s the same thing that happened to Toys R Us. The gigantic toy retailer was hurting from online competition, but was still profitable when purchased by a vulture fund. Rather than scaling back and finding a way to keep the operation going, the new owner simply bled it until it was no more, at a significant profit for its shareholders. Since 2004, Julie Reynolds writes in the Nation, “speculators have brought and sucked dry an estimated 679 hometown newspapers that reached a combined audience of 12.8 million people.”

As tragic as the Toys R Us implosion was for the 31,000 workers who lost their jobs without a dime in severance pay, the dismantling of community newspapers moves the needle to an even higher level of evil. Consumers can still obtain their favorite Hasbro action figures. Former newspaper subscribers, however, have nowhere else to go to find out what is going on with their local school board, city council or municipal leaders.

When I worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in the 1970s and early 1980s, there were well over 200 journalists on staff. That number now stands at 25 and falling, thanks to its current owner, Alden Capital, a private equity firm that acquired Digital First Media (DFM), now the second largest newspaper company in the country. This outfit has zero interest in journalism. In fact, it makes money by dismantling whatever journalism was left. DFM is leaving its footprint of news annihilation across the land. Once clearly one of the ten best newspapers in the country, the San Jose Mercury News has gone from a news staff of 400 to 40. Denver once had 600 journalists reporting the news at two papers. Only one remains, The Post, and Alden, true to its 90 percent reduction rule, has taken the newsroom count to around 60. The same thing is happening all over, from the Orange County (CA) Register to the Boston Herald.

These newspapers are being gutted, drained of all remaining value. Despite the fact that Alden’s media properties are operating on profit margins as high as 20-some percent, there is no pretense of maintaining ongoing viability. The strategy is simply one of managing decimation in a way that maximizes profits until death arrives.

Think for a moment of all the local news stories that have mattered to us over the years: city building inspectors on the take; school administrators doctoring test scores, police corruption, school busses that fail safety inspections, sexual harassment at City Hall. The list is endless. Those are the stories that come from reporters sitting through endless meetings, cultivating sources, pouring through public records that ordinary citizens don’t have the time to look at.

Killing a newspaper is not like killing a toy store. “Democracy,” as the Washington Post motto has it, “dies in darkness.” It’s a death brought on not only by authoritarian tyrants, but also by the sheer immorality of unregulated capitalism. Life in a civilized society demands that we weigh conflicting rights and values in order to remain true to our core principles. Surely, there must be a way in which the interests of corporate billionaires can be tempered just enough to prevent the premeditated slaughter of the public’s right to know. We need to find that way before the darkness consumes us.