Momnesia

Augusta Newspaper Struggles in Slow Economy

AUGUSTA, GA. - My husband opened the front door yesterday and pulled The Augusta Chronicle out of the front bushes. He was jonesing for his crossword puzzle, which - I swear - is the only reason we subscribe. Thirteen dollars a month for crossword puzzles. Don't get me started.

Anyway, he yanked it from its plastic sleeve and held it aloft with a look of astonishment: "Look at this!"

I turned from my continuing failure to beat Amber Carlson's high score in Facebook Word Twist and looked: "Yeah, honey, the paper comes every day."

"No! Look at the size of it!"

In his hand was a size of paper one would expect to see from a Wednesday edition, not the circulation-heavy Sunday paper.

"What on earth?" I exclaimed. Where were the circulars? Where were the long-form stories about pressing issues or year-end wrap-ups? Heck, where were the advertisements?

"That's the smallest Sunday edition I've ever seen," he said, looking down at the sad stack of sections in his lap.

"Yeah... doesn't look good," I said. I wonder about the fate of the Chronicle's employees, many of whom have been laid off in the last six months. Good, talented, hard-working people. With millions of dollars in loans hanging over the company's head during an economic downturn, what is the next step for the oldest continually printed newspaper in the South?

The Statesboro Herald paper just canceled their Monday edition, and even told workers not to come in on Monday to save the company money. Is this the next step for the Chronicle?

The Tampa Tribune is combining forces with the broadcast folks at Tampa's Newschannel 8 and the digital workers at tbo.com to share newsgathering skills and products. Morris Communications already has its own internal content-sharing mechanism, and - let's be honest - the majority of the copy available in any daily paper: wire stories. But will The Augusta Chronicle turn to other area newsgathering organizations to share information and copy?

The Detroit papers - The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News - have reduced home delivery to just 3 days a week. The Augusta Chronicle has already cancelled home deliveries in the outermost areas of their circulation pattern. Is this the next step they'll take?

The venerable Christian Science Monitor will - in the new year - be the first nationally ciruclated paper to replace its daily print edition with website access. They will also offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions. Granted, The Augusta Chronicle isn't distributed nationally. But might they localize this strategy?

There is a reason that weeklies have out-paced the dailies in terms of growth. The Association of Alternative News Weeklies says that the strategy of an alt-weekly is "local, local, local, sexy, local," which means we keep to our market, don't worry about filling pages with wire stories that can be faster and more easily read online, toss in a bit of controvery, humor, and sexiness when it fits the story, and - oh, yeah, we do it with local employees and resources. We don't, for example, outsource our design department to Asia, or our call center to Latin America. By streamlining our mission and targeting our market with laser-like precision, we keep our overhead low and speak directly to the people who want to hear from us, rather than muddying up the lines of communication with a bunch of stuff nobody asked for. A column on wine? Really? 'Cause I think you've tried that a couple of times before and it never works out.

But daily papers serve a different purpose than weekly papers, and their survival is essential to a healthy democrasy. And more is available to papers than the unchanging print-and-distribute methods available to newspapers - and I'm talking beyond what their woefully underdeveloped web sites can deliver.

For example, consider the digital paper developed by Fujitsu.

It is the world's first film substrate-based bendable color electronic paper with an image memory function. I don't know what substrate-based means, but the rest of the words make perfect sense: the new electronic paper features vivid color images that are unaffected even when the screen is bent, and features an image memory function that enables continuous display of the same image without the need for electricity. The thin and flexible electronic paper uses very low power to change screen images, thereby making it ideal for displaying information or advertisements in public areas as a type of new electronic media that can be handled as easily as paper.

Imagine a business model where such a "digital paper" is cheap enough that a newspaper could give one to new subscribers and wean them off the paper product. Or, if you didn't want to subscribe, you buy a screen and get the daily paper when you buy it, one at a time. Now imagine how much overhead that would save newspapers when their printing costs are all but obliterated. Imagine the drop in paper prices as demand around the world falls for the first time in generations. Imagine the decline in harvest forestry, as one of the industries that utilizes pulp paper almost completely ceases to purchase it.

Take these screen shots from the movie "Minority Report," in which a commuter reads USA Today on a train.

The breakthrough that made this paper possible is actually three years old. That means that the production kinks have most likely been worked out, and Fujitsu is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, in order to make this enterprise possible and profitable. Why not daily newspapers?

Or consider Amazon's bulkier but still portable Kindle device, currently sold-out on their site. Three years ago, they set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle, a plain, black and white wireless portable reading device.


Again, that's a new business model that people - and the planet, for all you greenies out there - could really get excited about again.

And it will soon be no longer a luxury, but a necessity for the dailies. Let's look at how people ages 45 and under interact with the media. When the actor Paul Newman died, many people found out via Twitter, e-mails or IMs. They then might have gone and checked out the lengthy entry about Newman (did you know Newman was 19th on Richard Nixon's enemies list?) on Wikipedia, which had likely already been updated. Then they'd visit YouTube and watch some of his old movie scenes (did you know he screen tested with James Dean for "East of Eden?"), or search the blogosphere for recollections from writers who had met or who felt a connection to the old-guard actor.

At no point do people feel the need to engage with a daily newspaper!

That is why alt-weeklies are thriving, and dailies are dying - almost literally! The daily readership is older, less affluent, and less technologically savvy. They are, as they say, "aging out" of newspaper readership. But humor, long-form journalism and a strong local focus never die. Hooray for the alt-weekly niche!

Still, everyone in the industry - daily or weekly, alt-weekly or magazine - has a lot of forward-thinking to do. And we can't be ruled by the bean-counters in suits, who expect the industry to right itself after the recession ends. Consumer media use has changed permanently. I expect we'll be seeing smaller and smaller editions of The Augusta Chronicle as its readership ages and shrinks. I expect we'll be seeing more direct competition between dailies as they contract, and weeklies as they expand.

Hopefully, media companies will move ahead with technological advances more current than simply choosing a web press based on price. I hope so. Because despite the decline of the American public's trust in journalism (thanks, Geraldo), it's still a needed to serve as a check and balance for our system of government. And I think we can all agree that as far as what body we can trust, the media ranks a lot higher than Congress.