Publishers were alerted to the coming change in December, and subscribers were notified last week. (If you have any of these subscriptions, you can see the timing for how they’ll be phased out; you won’t lose money.)

The Kindle was once seen as a possible savior for digital journalism (though Nieman Lab was always skeptical). In 2009, then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger appeared on stage with Jeff Bezos to introduce the larger-screened Kindle DX, saying, “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper.” From 2011 until 2020, people who subscribed to the Times on the Kindle got free access to NYTimes.com, too.

Amazon hasn’t shared its exact reason for the change (the company’s statement to publishers is here), but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn’t make financial sense to continue to support them. Instead, Amazon wants publishers to add their content to its $9.99/month digital subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which includes a bunch of magazines and access to one newspaper that I saw — USA TODAY.

Anyway, while this all feels very 2011, news publishers in particular should check out some of the comments on last week’s Reddit thread, where customers talk about why they liked reading newspapers on Kindle, and why they’re sorry to lose the subscriptions — and it still has to do with the “satisfying reading experience” Sulzberger talked about more than a decade ago.

Very disappointing. I had only recently discovered that I actually enjoy reading my local newspaper when it’s on the Kindle as opposed to the paper’s poorly designed website and frequently broken app.

In addition to the sheer legibility/readability of the Kindle screen display, I liked the Kindle editions for the Table of Contents feature and other navigational aids. These made it easy to skim, particularly in large issues of a pub like the daily New York Times…

I currently subscribe via Kindle Newsstand to the publications below. It will be a hassle to manage the subscriptions separately now, for each publisher, via their websites. This mirrors the mess that streaming television has become, fragmented into many different providers with their own payment schedules, subscriptions costs, log-in credentials, Terms of Service, etc. etc.

I have:

The New York Times – Daily Edition for Kindle
The New Yorker
Foreign Affairs
New Republic
The New York Review of Books
New York Magazine

Woke up to the email and I’m pretty pissed. Loved having a few magazines and newspapers on my Kindle. Much easier on the eyes than a phone/tablet, better battery life, and things just worked (some of the apps reload and you lose your place between sessions).

Very disappointing. I’ve subscribed to many newspapers and magazines via my kindle for many years and prefer its layout to most crappy apps. At this point, i have been only using my kindle to read newspapers and magazines (usually use the app for books).

This is hugely disappointing. I have been a NYT subscriber on the Kindle for so many years…more than 10. One of my fondest memories is on a trip to Greece, staying in a hotel on the side of a cliff, and barely getting enough 3G signal to download the Sunday Edition. During the summer, I wake up every day and sit on my deck and read the NYT while I drink a cup of coffee. I subscribe to the paper edition on the weekends but I actually prefer the Kindle edition in a lot of ways because it’s ad-free and easy to navigate.

I was mad enough about dropping support for 3G but this might be the end of my relationship with Kindle. I’ll switch brands to whatever I can get NYT on, or I’ll just skip the Kindle entirely. And I was hoping to upgrade soon… Kindle probably just lost a customer.

If you like reading news sites on Kindle, here’s a hack to keep you going.

As we recently found, in a study published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, many journalists themselves have come to see editorial endorsements as a liability. In 2020, we interviewed 64 political journalists with affiliations ranging from digital-only news outlets to national magazines to local and national newspapers. Most of the journalists we interviewed didn’t question their newsrooms’ ability to uphold the metaphorical wall between the editorial and reporting sides, with one reporter referring to it as “a pretty strict firewall.”

However, they also felt the need to explain to readers the divide between an endorsement from a newspaper’s editorial board and the newspaper’s other journalists. Some reporters told us that sources had asked them why they’d endorsed the other candidate. The journalists would find themselves clarifying that they hadn’t endorsed anyone — their editorial board had. As one journalist put it: “Nobody knows the distinction between the editorial board and the reporters, and that’s our fault for not telling them. Every four years we shoot ourselves in the foot.” Another noted: “Political parties like to bash some news organizations, leading to viewers believing a news organization is biased.” Endorsements, he added, “can exacerbate those preconceived notions.”

The journalists in our study largely found the practice of political endorsements to be somewhat archaic. Eight of those we spoke to defended endorsements, but even in those cases it was conditional — for example, one journalist argued the practice should exist only on a community level. Even supporters of the idea of endorsements felt that the practice exacerbated the already hard work of political journalism, complicated by growing political polarization and audience mistrust.

“Readers pay little attention to that distinction mark between opinion and non-opinion,” a journalist told us. “It contributes to the public’s view that publications have an agenda.”

Notably, when delineating the separation between the newsroom’s editorial board and news desk, journalists did so not only metaphorically — by evoking the imagery of a wall separating the two — but also grammatically, through the pronouns they used in explaining their newsroom’s practices to us. Journalists who worked in newsrooms that did offer endorsements used the term “they” to denote the editorial board and to emphasize their own separation from the endorsement process. In contrast, when journalists were in newsrooms that not offer endorsements, they often used the term “we” in describing the practice (e.g., “we don’t do that”), a rhetorical move signaling they embraced and internalized this position. One journalist said they had actually left their newsroom because it offered editorial endorsements.

Beyond issues of wellbeing and audience concern, the journalists we interviewed also indicated that endorsements aren’t particularly effective. In the words of one journalist, endorsements are likely to “affect the public’s perception of newspapers more than their perception of candidates.”

Some papers have already changed their policies. In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. election, McClatchy announced that the papers in its chain wouldn’t make presidential endorsements unless they’d individually interviewed both candidates. The Dallas Morning News made a similar decision to endorse neither candidate in 2020, after receiving blowback in 2016.

The journalists we interviewed found editorial endorsements to be most valuable in local races. The kinds of relationships local newspapers cultivate with readers, they said, are different from relationships with national newspapers. Local newspapers also enjoy higher levels of trust with readers than national papers do. This might make it more likely that the public will perceive editorial endorsements as an example of newspapers delivering on their promise to inform the public, rather than as examples of media bias.

In contrast to state and federal contests, journalists argued, in local elections, such as city council or mayoral races, contenders often run as nonpartisan candidates, which may make it less likely that the public will look at editorial endorsements through a partisan lens. A few pointed out that in local elections— which often end up overshadowed by the news coverage of national races — robust information about candidates is often lacking. This, again, could justify newspapers’ decisions to issue editorial endorsements as part of their service to the public.

But, based on our research, it’s worth considering whether news outlets’ endorsements are a tradition that continues to serve the public.

“The public cannot tell the difference,” one journalist told us. “When they hear ‘The New York Times’ editorial endorsed Elizabeth Warren,’ for example1, it trickles down on the journalist.”

1. Adding to the confusion, in 2020, The New York Times endorsed both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.

Some of you do, I imagine. Many of your favorite news sites used to be printed on paper and then deposited at local convenience stores for purchase. Others were wrapped in a bag and thrown on your porch by a child.

The conversations in journalism have shifted so completely to digital — rightly so! — that it’s easy to forget that printed newspapers are still a thing. And if you’re a local newspaper, print is still the thing, financially speaking. As Axios put it a few days ago:

The U.S. is expected to make history in 2026 when it becomes the first major media market in the world to see digital newspaper ad revenue eclipse print newspaper ad revenue, according to a new report from PwC.

2026. That’s how long it’ll take for newspapers’ digital ad revenue to “eclipse” print ad revenue. Though as the chart shows, it’ll be that weird kind of “eclipse” where the Moon stays perfectly still for a decade while the Sun goes black dwarf.

Is it really digital ad revenue "surpassing" print if it's really just digital ad revenue staying flat for a decade while print collapses?

"I surpassed Bol Bol in height that one time he took a nap"https://t.co/NAUBdPdYrY pic.twitter.com/Qq1t80yjGS

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) June 22, 2022

So as strange as it sounds to say in 2022, print is still the main money maker for the largest newsrooms in almost every city and town in the United States.

So I was glad to see William Turvill at Press Gazette had pulled together the list of the 25 American newspapers with the highest print circulation. (The data is from the Alliance for Audited Media.)

Let’s start with the good news on the list! (It won’t take long.) The Villages Daily Sun made the Top 25 for the first time, coming in at No. 23. The Villages is “Florida’s Friendliest Active Adult 55+ Retirement Community,” a place filled with the target audience for print newspapers. (You can leave Ohio, but you can’t leave a lifelong reading habit, I guess. Here’s a good profile of the paper from 2018.)

To put it another way: The Villages Daily Sun is located in a metro area of 129,752 people. But it sells more print copies on an average weekday than the:

— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (metro population: 2,053,232),
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2,657,149),
— Charlotte Observer (2,822,352),
— The (Baltimore) Sun (2,844,510),
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch (2,909,003),
— The (Portland) Oregonian (3,280,736), or
— The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer (3,633,962).

Or take an even bigger market: Atlanta, the 10th largest metro area in America, with a metro population of 6,930,423. On an average weekday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution sells 49,243 print newspapers. The Villages Daily Sun sells 49,183.

Within the next few months, it’ll pass the New York Daily News, which was the best-selling newspaper in America in the mid 20th century, topping out at 2.4 million copies a day. Somewhere, Weegee is turning over in his grave.

Outside The Villages, though, the outlook for print remains terrible. Average circulation among the largest papers dropped 12% over the past year, and it’s not going to stop dropping.

To show the scale of the damage, I dug into the archives to see how many papers America’s largest dailies were selling way back in 2000. That’s so far back that you could write a research paper on the most popular search engines and include Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, InfoSeek, HotBot, and Altavista — but not Google. Y2K! Bush v. Gore! It was a simpler time, and a pretty damned good one for print newspapers.

Here are the 20 highest-circulation newspapers in 2000, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.1 Next to their 2000 print circulation is their 2022 circulation. Next to that is a depressing number.

Yikes. That’s almost a CD-level collapse. Remember: Despite how much print has cratered, it is still the top source of revenue for the overwhelming majority of local newspapers. And it heads closer to zero every year.

While the direction (down) is consistent everywhere, there are some interesting differences among these newspapers. USA Today’s reliance on bulk sales to hotels has worsened its 91% decline. (The hotel industry was hit hard during the pandemic, and travelers with smartphones don’t have much need for print newspapers.) The quality national papers (the Times, Journal, and Post) had lower-than-average print declines — in large part, I’d say, because their digital subscription success has allowed them to avoid gutting their newsrooms’ quality and quantity.

Among the metros, the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis is the best performer, losing “only” 72% of its print circulation; you can attribute that to a better-than-average market, better-than-average ownership, and better-than-average execution. The two New York tabloids have taken divergent paths, with the Daily News down 92% vs. the Post’s 67% drop. That’s largely about ownership; the Daily News has been absolutely gutted by Tribune (Tronc!) and Alden to hit earnings targets, while Rupert Murdoch has long been willing to run the Post at a loss.

And of course the saddest number here is the zero next to the Rocky Mountain News, which shut down entirely in 2009. (That The Denver Post could still lose 86% of its print circulation despite losing its local rival deserves special notice. Great job, Alden.)

But here’s the thing: All of these numbers are going to zero. As the case of The Villages shows, print has become a niche product, overwhelmingly for senior citizens. Every year, some of them will die, and some others will have a grandchild help them figure out an iPad.

The primary industry goal for the past two decades has been a transition to digital — so that, when the time came, papers could shut down the presses but live on. It was a reasonable goal. The problem is that it’s 2022 and they’re still counting on print to pay the bills. Gannett, the country’s largest chain, still makes $2 in print for every $1 it makes in digital. In circulation revenue, Gannett still makes $9.60 in print for every $1 in digital. Newspapers have made progress in that transition — just not nearly enough.

1. The Audit Bureau of Circulations changed its name to the Alliance for Audited Media in 2012.

The research was led by Stephen Barclay of City, University of London, and funded by the Charitable Journalism Project, an initiative to help U.K. newsrooms gain charitable status. The researchers interviewed and conducted focus groups with residents of seven communities around the U.K.

While the report is titled “Local news deserts in the U.K.,” the seven communities examined do, in fact, have some traditional local news sources, but these are seen as inadequate and in many cases have been hollowed out, or merged and centralized.

In Lewisham, London, for instance, “the only traditional newspaper dedicated exclusively to the borough is the Lewisham News Shopper, a free weekly”; another free weekly covers Lewisham as well as other South London boroughs. But “many respondents were unaware that newspapers still existed which covered the borough,” the report’s authors note.

Every community had “a range of applicable local Facebook pages and groups.”

“A lot of it’s trash to be honest, but a lot of it’s very useful,” said one member of a focus group in Lewisham. “A couple of weeks ago there was these fireworks going on for 30 or 40 minutes… I was just kind of wondering what was going on and everyone had the answers.”

One of the admins of Spotted in Trowbridge, a large local Facebook group, said:

“We are quick. We don’t wait for hours on end before checking in and publishing the information sent to us…The people want to be heard and, provided it is done with respect, we allow them to have their voice…Even if it’s not said with complete respect, we allow people to comment as they wish….we have no right to determine if they are right / wrong or otherwise.”

A worker for the National Health Service in Whitby said:

“In the past we have used the Whitby Gazette to publicize changes in our [NHS] services. Like flu vaccine campaigns. We don’t do that now because putting something on Facebook is more effective than putting it in the Gazette.”

Local Facebook groups were also a source of rumors and misinformation. A worker with Citizens Advice Bureau — a U.K. charity that provides free, confidential assistance on all kinds of topics — said:

“We spend a fair amount of time fighting off Facebook rumors. Housing allowance is a good example. We’ll have a client who comes in and says ‘I need to apply for social housing.’ We say ‘You need to go through this process, be on the waiting list, bid for a property’ and they say ‘But if I’d come from Syria and I was a refugee I’d get given a house automatically no questions asked’ and we ask ‘Where did you hear this?’ they say ‘I saw it on a Facebook site.'”

The Facebook groups do not offer investigative reporting. And “respondents were clear that a wide range of local issues and institutions were not getting sufficient coverage,” the report’s authors write. “Where there was coverage, respondents believed that much of it was driven by institutional public affairs teams and press releases, rather than independent reporting.”

They’re … not wrong! “We tend to write the story for them, supply the pictures and caption and suggested headline. That’s the way to get it in,” said one representative of a local charity about how they get coverage in the local paper. “I got to edit the article. I mean actually changing the words. I’ve never had that before.”

A bright spot, sometimes, is the Local Democracy Reporting Service, a BBC initiative that places journalists in regional news organizations:

[In] some cases the coverage of local government was singled out as relatively good compared to the coverage of other institutions and public services. Though respondents (except those who worked in journalism) were not aware of the scheme, the reporting referred to could be traced to the Local Democracy Reporter (LDR) in the area.

“The journalists covering local government have been brilliant in terms of going to council meetings and tweeting stuff.” [Interview, Trowbridge]

LDRs were able to maintain coverage of council meetings in some areas, to varying extents, where this had been cut down due to staff shortages. However, the LDR scheme does not work uniformly well. Northamptonshire has struggled to recruit due to low pay and the rarity of the skillset required, leaving a position vacant for over a year at the time of writing [interview, Corby]. In one community the LDR left to join the local authority as a communications officer.

“You can keep up to date with local politics if you look for it but what’s the point if you can’t do anything?” one interviewee said.

You can read the full report here.

McClatchy is a special case; Alden tried to buy it out of bankruptcy, but Chatham was its largest creditor and thus had an inside track. (Reminder: Chatham likes to call this moment “late-stage media consolidation,” which means the consolidation has spread all throughout your lymph nodes and it’s time to settle your affairs.)

But other than McClatchy, all of these companies have been sorted into three buckets: two big ones, No. 1 Gannett and No. 2 Alden, and one smaller one, No. 3 Lee Enterprises.

It was pretty clear this day would come. Lee is the biggest acquisition target left out there, with papers in 77 markets across 26 states — not to mention “nearly 350 weekly and specialty publications.” Adding it to its MediaNews/Digital First/Tribune menagerie should bring it close to Gannett in size, if not quite there.

Based on last year’s circulation numbers, a combined Alden+Lee would sell 7.627 million copies a day, behind only Gannett’s 8.596 million. They’d both be far ahead of the new No. 3, McClatchy, which is way back at 1.747 million.

You can read the offer letter Alden sent Lee’s board here. It hits the same notes that nocturnal Alden usually does in its rare visits to the sunlit world: “Alden Global Capital, LLC is a significant investor in American newspapers,” “committed to ensuring communities nationwide have access to robust, independently minded local journalism,” “a reaffirmation of our substantial commitment to the newspaper industry,” “scale is critical for newspapers to ensure necessary staffing and in order to thrive in this challenging environment,” blah, blah, blah.

At some previous companies that Alden has tried to acquire, there’s been resistance — from management, employees, civic leaders, or all of the above. Remember, it tried to eat Gannett in 2019, but the company successfully fought back — though that resistance pushed it into the arms of another suitor, GateHouse. Tribune reporters battled valiantly, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep Alden away.

But frankly, I’d be surprised if Lee put up much of a fight this time. Financing was a major question in the Gannett push; Alden is offering to pay cash here. The Tribune deal took place over in multiple stages over a longer period of time, giving opponents time to strategize; here, Alden says they want to have it all wrapped up “in approximately four weeks.”

And frankly, Tribune owned papers in big metros like New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Orlando, and South Florida, the sort of places where you can rev up some media attention. Lee’s biggest papers are in St. Louis, Omaha, Tulsa, and Buffalo. Its headquarters are in a suburban office park in Davenport, Iowa; Tribune Tower this ain’t. And, at least at this writing, Lee isn’t pushing back against Alden. It’s not commenting to media reporters, whereas Gannett was cranky from the jump.

There are still some other chains to be had, of course. Advance is still out there, should the Newhouses ever grow itchy. Hearst still has a few big metros, though newspapers are a declining part of their business. Ogden is Lee-like in a number of ways. And the newspaper business is still much more decentralized than many American industries, with hundreds of papers still owned as single units — in the lucky places, still by families with a connection to and investment in the community.

But it’s as clear as ever that Dean Singleton was thinking in the right direction back in the early 1990s. He thought there would be just three newspaper companies left standing, and he wanted MediaNews to be one of them. After this deal — and whatever aftershocks follow it, as the boards of smaller chains see themselves on the outside of a two-horse race — we’ll be left with Gannett, Alden Global Capital, and then everybody else.

And Gannett is selling — “confident that we will be able to execute on $100-125 million in additional asset sales this year” — while Alden is buying. With cash.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/11/the-vulture-is-hungry-again-alden-global-capital-wants-to-buy-a-few-hundred-more-newspapers/feed/ 0 https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/cancel-culture-why-do-people-cancel-news-subscriptions-we-asked-they-answered/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/cancel-culture-why-do-people-cancel-news-subscriptions-we-asked-they-answered/#respond Thu, 28 Oct 2021 18:38:20 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=197072