Accessibility is a relatively small area of focus in journalism right now. There aren’t yet a lot of roles like the one I’m starting now. At its core, I think journalism is about wanting valuable information accessible to as many people as possible, and I believe I have potential to create real change if I invest fully into it. Thankfully, the Post agreed and created this new title.

At an organization like the Post, we have great opportunity to contribute to the broader discussions surrounding accessibility and technology. I’ve often found myself wishing conversations in this area were more inclusive of people with a diversity of backgrounds and identities. It’s essential to think about accessibility not just in the context of disability but also in the context of other inequities affecting news coverage and access to news. For instance, writing in plain language for users with cognitive disabilities can also benefit users with lower reading literacy. [The Post published a plain language version of Foreman’s introductory blog post.] Making pages less complex can make them more user-friendly and also possible to load in the first place for folks in areas with bad internet, etc.

It’s definitely stressful to be the first in this new role. I feel deep down like I need to justify its creation with every step that I take. My managers and colleagues have been fully supportive, and it is thanks to them that the role exists, so I would say that the pressure feels self-enforced. Thankfully, there is a lot of collaboration in the accessibility world, and I have already been in contact with some folks from outside of The Post regarding how we can support each other.

The New York Times reports:

As [Bezos] left, a Post employee wearing a red shirt emblazoned with the insignia of The Post’s guild stopped him and asked why the company was laying people off without offering buyouts first, according to the three people with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Bezos responded that he was at The Post to listen, not answer questions, and underscored his commitment to The Post’s journalism.

The Post was on track to end 2022 in the red after years of profitability, The New York Times reported in August. The Post has struggled to grow its subscription business, with fewer paying subscribers last year than the three million it had in 2020, a presidential election year.

Post employees could be forgiven for thinking the timing feels ~a little weird~. Bezos — not Amazon — is the owner of the Post, but his visit took place a day after Amazon commenced “what’s poised to be the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.” The company’s HR and stores departments appear to be most affected, but there were also a significant cuts at ComiXology, the digital comics platform Amazon bought in 2014. One ComiXology employee who was laid off said he believes that “at least 50% of the staff have been let go,” though Amazon has not confirmed that number. (According to LinkedIn, ComiXology had around 100 employees.) Artist, writer, and illustrator Jonathan H. Gray tweeted:

Still thinking about Comixology & how Amazon bought a thing that worked, gutted it, shat in its bed, and then threw it away because they didn’t want to play with it any more.

Jobs lost, livelihoods upended, & a fresh digital horizon that was opened up is now gone on a whim.

Amazon is also shuttering AmazonSmile, the charity program that allowed me to donate countless cents to my children’s school. And to throw a little more bad news on the pile, Microsoft said Wednesday that it will lay off around 10,000 employees — about 5% of its global work force.

It is very depressing, but surely some bright spots can be found over in the creator economy? Well…maybe not. From a new Financial Times piece:

Patreon, which secured a $4 billion valuation in 2021, told the Financial Times it was abandoning plans to introduce cryptocurrency payments and had delayed previous ambitions of an initial public offering.

Substack, the much-hyped newsletter service valued at $650 million in March 2021, told the FT it had given up on near-term plans to raise further capital to support the business.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned video gaming streaming service, has announced plans to take a larger cut from subscription payments for some of its biggest streamers next year.

A third of people who use a paid-for media subscription, including for payments to creators, plan to cut back in the next six months, according to market research company Mintel.

The FT, citing data from data provider Dealroom, says investment in the creator economy sector rose from $1.4 billion in 2020 to $3.3 billion in 2021 — before crashing back to $801 million last year “as investors became increasingly nervous about frothy valuations in private tech companies.”

On Wednesday, the Washington Post launched its own personalized annual review that shows subscribers insights about the journalism they consumed in 2022 in a similar visual format. It’s technically called “Newsprint,” but almost everyone who shared their stats so far called it some variation of “Washington Post Wrapped.”

For anyone who doesn’t know: Spotify Wrapped is an annual, personalized summary that shows users interesting data points about their listening habits, like their most listened to songs and podcasts and their top genres and artists. (Unsurprisingly, my top artist has been Bad Bunny for multiple years in a row.) It’s packaged vertically like an Instagram story and designed for sharing on social media.

wapo wrapped just dropped pic.twitter.com/i0qJBZKltk

— angel (@angelmendoza___) November 30, 2022

The Washington Post’s version tells readers how many stories they read, how many topics they engaged with, their most read sections of the paper, how many different authors they’ve read, and which writers they read most often. Newsprint also makes suggestions for stories the reader may have missed, newsletters to subscribe to, and other authors to follow. The summary slide shows the factoids as ridges on a fingerprint.

The Post declined to share specific audience numbers, but said it emailed “some” of its subscribers on Wednesday to let them know about the feature. More subscribers will be notified about the feature in mid-December, a spokesperson for the Post said in an email.

Jessica Gilbert, head of product at the Washington Post, said in an email that Newsprint offers a way to further personalize the reader experience.

“We developed Newsprint iteratively throughout 2022, responding to user research and internal feedback,” Gilbert said. “We initially built a ‘look-back’ experience but pivoted when we learned that our readers are more interested in insights that center on their reading ‘personality’ and content discovery rather than revisiting news from the past.”

Annual summary and review products like Spotify Wrapped can be both fun and useful to companies and users. They drum up excitement and can resurface some of the content that prompted people to subscribe in the first place. The Post’s version reminds subscribers of all the journalism they’ve enjoyed, highlights specific reporters that keep the reader coming back for more, and compliments their taste in news.

In both cases, the companies get a pulse on what resonates with users. Subscribers get to learn something (potentially) new about themselves and see what they’re getting by paying for a subscription.

Here’s what’s unique about my @WashingtonPost reading this year. You can get your 2022 Newsprint at https://t.co/l8Vd1ONP4v. #PostNewsprint pic.twitter.com/zFLTTThsYD

— Ryan Osborn (@rozzy) November 30, 2022

Sharing on social media lets people compare their insights with others, creating engagement between users and between the artists (or journalists) and their audiences. People share screenshots online, creating a stream of content while roasting themselves or doing a little humble bragging. There are always memes.

wapo wrapped calling me out for reading my own articles https://t.co/nKjC7V8n3Q pic.twitter.com/HhKwDCQ0gH

— Nathan Grayson (@Vahn16) November 30, 2022

In 2021, Spotify Wrapped was mentioned in 1.2 million posts on Twitter and its cards were shared nearly 60 million times across multiple social media platforms. Last year, the streaming company’s mobile app downloads increased 21% the week the campaign launched.

Michael Ribero, chief subscriptions officer at the Washington Post, said the Post wants to build on Newsprint and use it as a feature to help “attract new subscribers and increase brand awareness through social sharing” in future years.

If you have a Washington Post subscription, you don’t have to wait for an email. You can generate your personalized Newsprint summary here.

Folks couldn’t help but compare the offerings:

The Times: See if you could be a … major league umpire!!! ( ᴜ ω ᴜ )

The Post: I bet you’d make a great rat.https://t.co/FG2ilBp9jm

— Philip Bump (@pbump) October 28, 2022

The NYT: Think you can call balls and strikes better than an MLB umpire. Here’s an interactive game with real life examples and video

The Post: SimRatty https://t.co/MPYy2QuISt

— Derek A (@Son_DeeRRF) October 28, 2022

Games, I probably don’t have to tell you, can be pleasantly diverting, especially when the rest of the news is about election deniers, political violence, and tragic mass-death events.

In the quest to create the daily habits that many publishers see as critical to retaining subscribers, news organizations have invested in digital games and puzzles, from the classic crosswords to shelling out seven figures for a game called Wordle.

The rat and umpire games we’re talking about here are a little different than those examples in that they’re not ones you’d play again and again. (Though some wouldn’t mind changing that!) Instead, the creators  described them, alternatively, as “gamifying the news,” “interactive, fan-centered service journalism,” and “evergreen news-you-can-use.”

With news fatigue and news avoidance on the rise, the thinking goes, being able to deliver your core product — journalism — in a ~~~fun~~~ format can’t hurt.

Jonathan Ellis, deputy sports editor at The New York Times, said on Friday that the interactive umpire game has been one of the most-read pieces across the site since it published last week. The Times has turned sports news into interactive games in the past, too, challenging readers to beat sprinter Usain Bolt off the blocks or predicting whether an N.F.L. pass is complete or incomplete.

For the umpire challenge, the Times created a social-friendly shareable score reminiscent of Wordle:

This is a great example of the newsgame genre. Does well to intersperse the gameplay with explanation and analysis — always the trickiest thing in something like this.

You Be the Ump 7/7
https://t.co/RESrtTmYVd

— Martin Stabe (@martinstabe) October 28, 2022

This somehow makes me feel worse

You Be the Ump 7/7
https://t.co/2xKr7nCnxV

— Ashley Lauren (@ashleyleylauren) October 27, 2022

Ellis edited the piece, while graphics and multimedia editor Sean Catangui, The Upshot’s Kevin Quealy, and other editors on the sports and digital news design teams made contributions. Ultimately, though, Ellis credited graphics and multimedia editor Mike Beswetherick for coming up with the idea and pursuing it as a “passion project.”

“[Beswetherick] was intrigued that Major League Baseball was talking about the idea of using an automated strike zone to call balls and strikes, replacing the umpires’ traditional role, and wanted to explore just how accurate or inaccurate human umpires are,” Ellis explained. “There are already various websites that track umpire accuracy, but we quickly came up with the idea of letting readers see for themselves how hard (or easy?) it is for umpires to make the right calls — and so that in turn became the idea for a gamified format.”

“We felt that a simple game could really show, not tell, readers what it was like to try to make accurate calls as pitches sped toward them,” Ellis added.

The Times converted data provided by the MLB — including the starting position, velocity, and acceleration of each pitch — to create the three-dimensional game.

I did, embarrassingly, manage to slip in that I got a perfect score under the pretense of asking Ellis what percentage of readers “also” called all seven pitches correctly. He told me that the Times didn’t track how well users played in the game — but that I shouldn’t wait at home for a call from the MLB.

“I’m sorry to say you’re not alone atop the standings,” he said, noting that many of the scores shared to social media were also 7-for-7. “The game wasn’t intended to make umpires’ jobs look too easy — and we note in the piece that the professionals are highly accurate. Even if you miss just one of the seven pitches, you only got 85.7% correct, which is lower than the M.L.B. umpires’ 2022 rate of 93.8% correct.”

(The last pitch, a fastball on the outside corner, did trip up many players, Ellis added.)

Staff at The Washington Post described their game as a “passion project” as well. Inspired by “the nearly endless stream” of videos of rats around the city on social media, designer Tara McCarty conceived of the initial idea for a rat-based video game. The Metro desk’s Dana Hedgpeth and Alisa Tang, designer/developer Joe Fox, illustrator Shelly Tan, and several others contributed to the game, part of a bigger package about rats in D.C. that also includes a rat quiz and a feature with rat catchers sharing tips as well as videos of their epic “showdowns” with the large rodents.

If that last line made you shiver, you’re not alone. The Post took pains not to make the game too realistic by giving the main character — a long-toothed fellow named “Cheddar” —  a pixelated, retro feel.

“We leaned into a retro theme for the game to make it feel softer and more engaging. People have strong reactions to rats — if it’s too realistic of a rendering, it might scare off potential users,” deputy design director Matthew Callahan said in an email. “Everything from the color palette to the rendering was meant to evoke a retro and soothing game — sort of a Super Mario meets Animal Crossing — rather than something grotesque.”

NYC: “this is NOT ratatouille. rats are NOT our friends.”
the post: “here is a video game you are the rat and the object is to get inside a D.C. home” https://t.co/iO4Xxdbo9s

— Colleen Grablick (@colleengrablick) October 28, 2022

Still, there are plenty of disgusting/amazing moments in the feature. The pet poop left in backyards is described as a nutrient-dense “energy bar” for rats and, as players maneuver into a restaurant’s kitchen as Cheddar, they learn the rodents can squeeze into spaces the size of a marble due to their collapsible rib cage.

“Parsing through fact and fiction when it comes to rats was fascinating,” designer Tara McCarty said when asked what stuck out. “The idea that rats gnaw things to prevent their teeth from growing super long is a myth. Learning about sebum — the dirt and oils that rub off of rat fur onto the sidewalks and cement they frequent — was an eye opener.”

“We can’t unsee or unlearn the things we’ve come across in this reporting process,” McCarty added.

The Post has experimented with newsy games dating back, at least, to the 8-bit-style Floppy Candidate game in 2016, in which presidential candidates navigate news-centric obstacles. They’ve produced various “SantaSearches” every year since 2017 (including one where Christmas elves battle supply chain issues) and, in May 2022, Fox and graphics reporter/illustrator Dylan Moriarty built a game that uses a round of mini golf to illustrate how politicians can use gerrymandering to tilt elections. (“Think of us as your caddie,” the game instructions read. “We’ll show you how the district shapes are the result of careful calculation and offer help to spot gerrymandering in the wild. Can you beat par — and other Washington Post readers — in our first-ever Gerrymander Invitational?”)

“Rather than just reporting the news or trying to explain it, it encouraged readers to engage with it,” Callahan said about these types of games. “It can make it easier for a reader to spend time and create a connection with the story.”

The Post’s rat game is available on desktop and mobile, but the teams said they designed Cheddar’s adventures through a community garden, neighborhood dumpster, and restaurant with mobile in mind.

“A few things were trickier than expected — for example, making sure the user could hold down the on-screen buttons without triggering their phone’s text selection. That was fundamentally a completely new interaction we haven’t really used before,” designer/developer Joe Fox said.

“From a format perspective, The Post is deeply interested in pushing our storytelling — we aim to learn from a technological and editorial perspective on each project like this that we publish,” Callahan added. “By taking these learnings back, it gives us a head start on the next story, enabling us to build faster and smarter, and put tools in more people’s hands. This helps us think more about the story and less about the code roadblocks.”

The Washington Post said they’d seen the topic of rats resonate with their readers on social media, and that even internally, every time they talked about their game idea, “more and more people in and out of the newsroom wanted to share their own rat stories and things that they had learned.” The interest helped get the package off the ground.

For smaller newsrooms with fewer resources than the Times or Post — and that’s most of us — publishing as many interactive games at the same level might be out of reach. But games also don’t have to be high-tech marvels. If your small and/or local newsroom is experimenting with games or puzzles, let me know.

Ranges have to include a minimum and maximum — employers can’t say something like “$15/hour and up.” So some — cough, New York Post, cough — are finding wiggle room with useless ranges like “$15/hour to $125,000.” Some CNN positions included pay ranges of nearly $100,000.

We went searching through the job boards to find what media companies, both those based in New York City and those that have offices or some positions there, are paying — and whether they’re adhering to the, um, spirit of the law. (By the way, is it fair to expect companies to be complying already? Yes, they’ve had months to prepare and the rule was already delayed once.)

This list is up-to-date as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

ABC

Examples:

• Producer (consumer investigative) – GMA, ABC News: $99,400–$136,730
• Digital editor, hard news – ABC News: $75,200–$103,400

AP

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic appears to be providing salary ranges for all positions, including those with the option of working remote. Examples:

• Senior photo editor: “Salary Minimum: $100,000, Salary Maximum: $120,000.”
• Staff writer, The Daily: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $70,000.”
• Product manager: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $130,000.”

Axios

Axios is providing salary ranges for jobs listed under its “NYC Office,” even if they are remote. Salary information is not given for jobs based out of other offices. Examples:

• Associated director, integrated marketing: “On target earnings for this role is in the range of $90,000-$110,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills.”
• Senior software engineer (backend): “Base salary ranges for this role are listed below and are dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills. This range does not include other compensation benefits.
  L6: $160k – $210k
  L5: $160k – $200k
  L4: $130k – $190k”

Bloomberg

Examples:

• Newsletter producer (contract): “35 – 45 USD Hourly”
• News automation content engineer: $105,000–160,000
• Senior video producer: $110,000–$115,000

Bustle Digital Group

Examples:

• Deputy features director: $85,000–$105,000
• Writer and director, branded video: $72,500–$78,000
• Entertainment editor, Nylon: $63,500–$70,000

BuzzFeed

• News editor, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $72,500-$87,000”
• Business analyst, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $73,000-$82,000”
• Features editor, Complex: $83,000–$100,000

CBS News

Examples:

• Editor: $110,000-$120,000
• Senior editor, CBSNews.com: $100,000–$109,000

CNN

Examples:

• Producer, Snapchat, CNN Digital Video: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $85,540.00 – $158,860.00 salary per year.”
• Senior section editor, social: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $113,890.00 – $211,510.00 salary per year.”

Chalkbeat

Example:

• People operations assistant: $50,000–$60,000

The City

Examples:

• Investigations editor: $140,000–$150,000
• Associate director of development, individual giving: $110,000–$120,000

Condé Nast

Examples:

• Executive director, brand marketing, Vanity Fair: $145,000–$180,000
• SEO writer and producer, Glamour: $60,000–$78,000
• Executive editor, news, Wired: $170,000–$225,000

The Daily Beast

Example:

• Entertainment critic: $90,000–$100,000

FT

Examples:

• Associate editor: $95,000–$110,000
• Reporter, FundFire: $65,000–$72,000

Dotdash Meredith

Examples:

• Methodology writer, beauty: “This is a contract role at 40 hours per week and would be hybrid. The rate for this position is $27/hour.”
• General manager, Verywell Health: $146,000–$219,000

First Look Media

Examples:

• Designer: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 65K – 75K”
• Senior analyst, Topic streaming service: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 90K – 100K”

Forbes

Forbes appears to be posting salary ranges for all jobs. Examples:

• Senior editor, newsletters: “The annual base salary range for this role is: $115,000 – $140,000.”
• Breaking news politics reporter: “This is a contract position with potential for full time employment…Hourly Rate Range: $28.85 – $28.85.”

Fortune

Example:

• VP, newsletters: $175,000–$200,000.

G/O Media

Examples:

• Staff writer, Quartz: “This is a position covered under the collective bargaining agreement with the WGA-East which establishes the minimum salary for this position at $62,000. This position is set at a range of $62,000 to $68,000.”
• Editorial director, New York, NY: “The salary for this position ranges from $300,000.00 to $350,000.00.”

The Guardian

Examples:

• Deputy editor, race and equity: $180,000–$190,000
• Reporter, fossil fuels and climate: $88,000–$100,000

The Information

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

Insider Inc.

Examples:

• Business features editor: $150,000–$220,000
• Politics correspondent: $100,000–$140,000

NBC

Examples:

• Reporter, Select: $75,000–$125,000
• Updates editor, Select: $75,000–$90,000

New York Post

• Decider digital project manager: “$50,000–$145,000”
• SEO manager: $50,000- $145,000
• Deputy photo editor, Sunday (Tues–Sat): “$50,000- $145,000”
• Sports digital reporter/producer: “$15/hour – $125,000”
• Tech reporter: “$50,000- $145,000”
• Politics reporter: “$15/hour – $125,000”

New York Times

The Times is providing base pay salary ranges, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• Senior designer: $76,500–$105,000
• Reporting fellowship: $76,168.04
• Legal affairs correspondent in Washington, D.C.: $115,506.56–$170,000.00
• Director, story and audience analytics: $152,000–$185,000.00
• Senior art director, games: $140,000–$165,000
• Supervising editor, style, Wirecutter, in New York, NY or remote: $92,650–$109,000

Penske Media Corporation

Examples:

• Associate director, paid social: $100,000–$110,000
• Vibe music editor: $75,000–$85,000
• Rolling Stone photo coordinator: $52,000–$62,000

Puck

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Reuters

Examples:

• Product manager – video: $122,500–$227,500
• Reader revenue analytics: $60,200–$111,800

Slate

Examples:

• News editor: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $82,000 and $100,000.”
• Podcast host – ICYMI: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $100,000 and $115,000.”

Substack

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Time

Examples:

• Manager of product design: $85,000–$125,000
• Newsletter operations manager: $75,000–$105,000

Vice

Examples:

• Editor, shopping and reviews: “New York/California: 64,000 – 75,000 USD. Outside New York/California: 54,000 – 64,000 USD”
• Associate writer, affiliate: “New York/California: 55,000 – 60,000 USD”
• VP, audio: “New York/California: 190,000 – 230,000 USD”

Vox Media

Vox is providing salary ranges for all positions, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• NowThis director of analytics: “The minimum and maximum salary for this position is $125,000.”
• Cities manager, Eater (temporary while manager is on maternity leave): “The annual base pay range for this job is $77,000 to $108,000.”

Wall Street Journal

Examples:

• Executive producer, news podcasts: $50,000 to $180,000
• Audio reporter, The Journal podcast: $40,000 to $160,000
• Reporter, careers and workplace: $50,000 to $180,000

Washington Post

Examples:

• Sales sector director: $200,500–$334,100
• Graphic designer: $59,167.16–$125,600

WNYC

Examples:

• Major gifts officer: $82,000-$100,000.
• Housing reporter, WNYC/Gothamist: $84,413-$86,000.

Much more here.

Seven years later, “indefinitely” seems to be over: Post-subscribing Amazon Prime members who were paying that $3.99/month rate have been informed over the past couple of days that their monthly price will triple to $12. That’s the normal rate currently offered through the Post’s site. (Separately, and confusingly, you can also still buy a Washington Post Kindle subscription, which “includes unlimited access to all content from The Washington Post Company website and The Washington Post Company mobile apps,” for $7.99 per month via Amazon’s site. That price is up from $5.99 per month a year ago.)

The price increase comes as the Post’s digital business appears to have stalled: The New York Times recently reported that the Post has lost paying digital subscribers since 2020 and that its digital ad revenue has fallen. I’ve asked the Post for comment and will update this if I hear back. The change implies, though, that the Post no longer sees enough of a strategic advantage in introducing Prime members to the paper that it’s willing to subsidize them. (It still runs plenty of general pricing specials, though.)

Prime members might have let a $3.99 monthly charge slide even if they weren’t reading the Post much. Will that change when the price goes up to $12 a month, entering Spotify and Netflix territory? We’ll see. (Or maybe we won’t, since the Post doesn’t publicly release subscription numbers.)

Meanwhile, the price of an Amazon Prime subscription rose to $139 per year last spring.

I wish that this weren’t true. But events this week make it very clear that if you can’t bear to believe it — even if it seems so impossible that it needs a heartily skeptical fact-checking treatment — it is going to happen.

And reporters who want to tell these stories (and the news organizations those reporters work for) may have to abandon some conventional journalism wisdom in order to give the stories the attention they deserve.

Last week, in response to the Supreme Court’s vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden signed an executive order in an attempt to protect abortion access. In remarks at the time, Biden said, “Just last week, it was reported that a 10-year-old girl was a rape victim — 10 years old — and she was forced to have to travel out of state to Indiana to seek to terminate the pregnancy and maybe save her life.” The story he was citing was published by the Indianapolis Star on July 1.

From that story:

On Monday three days after the Supreme Court issued its groundbreaking decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, took a call from a colleague, a child abuse doctor in Ohio.

Hours after the Supreme Court action, the Buckeye state had outlawed any abortion after six weeks. Now this doctor had a 10-year-old patient in the office who was six weeks and three days pregnant.

Could Bernard help?

The two-byline story — written by Shari Rudavsky and Rachel Fradette — made headlines around the world. But the first reaction of mainly right-leaning news organizations — despite the fact that the doctor who performed the abortion was on the record saying this happened — was to try to debunk it. Why? I mean, in part because it’s horrible and we don’t want to believe a 10-year-old could get raped and pregnant, because 10-year-olds are babies themselves. (By the way, Covid appears to have increased early-onset puberty around the world. Getting your period “early” now means getting it when you’re younger than 8. People for whom a pregnant 10-year-old strains credulity should keep this in mind.)

The debate over the story’s veracity started with a Washington Post “Fact Checker” column. In “A one-source story about a 10-year-old and an abortion goes viral,” the Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote:

The only source cited for the anecdote was Bernard. She’s on the record, but there is no indication that the newspaper made other attempts to confirm her account. The story’s lead reporter, Shari Rudavsky, did not respond to a query asking whether additional sourcing was obtained. A Gannett spokeswoman provided a comment from Bro Krift, the newspaper’s executive editor: “The facts and sourcing about people crossing state lines into Indiana, including the 10-year-old girl, for abortions are clear. We have no additional comment at this time.”

Kessler notes that Bernard “declined to identify to the Fact Checker her colleague or the city where the child was located” and that after “a spot check,” he was unable to find evidence that the rape had been reported in Ohio. He wrote:

This is a very difficult story to check. Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.

Kessler doesn’t appear to consider the professional, non-nefarious reasons that a doctor might have for declining to share the names of her colleagues, or why she might be loath to (plus, due to privacy laws, legally prohibited from) disclose the name and address of her patient who was raped to a national newspaper.

“An abortion by a 10-year-old is pretty rare,” Kessler notes. (Oh, that “by.”) “The Columbus Dispatch reported that in 2020, 52 people under the age of 15 received an abortion in Ohio.” Definitions of “rare” may vary, but if 52 under-15-year-olds got abortions in Ohio in 2020, that’s one a week — and it’s just abortions that were reported, during a pandemic when a lot of abortion clinics were closed.

The Post column opened the door to worse takes. “Every day that goes by, the more likely that this is a fabrication. I know the cops and prosecutors in this state. There’s not one of them that wouldn’t be turning over every rock, looking for this guy and they would have charged him,” Ohio attorney general Dave Yost told USA Today’s Ohio Network bureau on Tuesday. Picking up on Kessler’s “single source” criticism, Yost added, “Shame on the Indianapolis paper that ran this thing on a single source who has an obvious axe to grind.”

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board called the episode “An abortion story too good to confirm,” as if there was something particularly juicy and delicious about this one (hint: It’s her age!)

Mid-day on Wednesday, the Indianapolis Star published its follow-up. An Ohio man has been charged with the 10-year-old’s rape. In the story, which has four bylines, reporters Tony Cook, Bethany Bruner, Monroe Trombly, and Dayeon Eom note that Columbus police “were made aware of the girl’s pregnancy through a referral by Franklin County Children Services that was made by her mother on June 22,” that “the timeline given by police coincides with the account Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis physician who provides abortion services, shared,” and that the girl “had recently turned 10, meaning she was likely impregnated at 9 years old.”

“This story is an interesting example of how news can be widely shared these days,” Kessler told me via email. “It was picked up by outlets around the world and it was based on one source — someone who was an activist in one side of the debate — without an apparent effort to confirm it. This fact check added more context and was updated once there was a new development.”

I was the ONLY reporter in the courtroom this morning as the man accused of raping a 10-year-old girl, impregnating her, leading to an abortion in Indiana, was arraigned.

This confirms that the case exists.https://t.co/eWvtBMxqZW

— Bethany Bruner (@bethany_bruner) July 13, 2022

“While reporting this story, the Fact Checker had contacted the Franklin County agency to ask if such a referral had been made,” Kessler noted in a Wednesday update to his piece. “Unlike similar Ohio county agencies we contacted, Franklin County officials did not offer a response.”

Kessler didn’t mention in the original column that some of the agencies he’d contacted hadn’t responded. Sometimes reporters or their editors decide to leave certain details out of stories. In a fact-checking column, that might be because the additional information feels extraneous or muddies the column’s narrative.

In, say, a reported story about a child who must travel out of state to receive an abortion because abortion is illegal after six weeks in the state where she lives, there are other reasons a publication might leave out identifying details.

In America after the end of Roe v. Wade, one brave source on the record in the final story will often be the best we can get. Obviously, reporters and editors must make sure that their reporting is accurate and true! But those who believe that the end of legal abortion in many states is newsworthy will need to figure out how to report and publish these stories with a few more constraints than they’d prefer. If performing or receiving an abortion now counts as activism, well, then journalists will need to be okay quoting “activists,” unless they only want to tell the anti-abortion movement’s side.

Countless abortion stories will never be told at all. It won’t be because they’re lies. It will be because telling them is too risky, because patients and doctors and staffers and volunteers will face arrest for coming forward.

The facts will live on in the shadows. The women and children’s real lives will continue. Even if their stories seem “too good” to be true. Even if you wish they weren’t.

In a new episode of “Sway,” her New York Times podcast, host Kara Swisher interviewed Buzbee about her future plans for the Post, her job interview with Post owner (and richest man on Earth but also space) Jeff Bezos, and how the news organization is thinking about missteps like the newsroom’s handling of reporter Felicia Sonmez and issuing corrections to its coverage of the Steele dossier.

The Post’s newsroom has grown to 1,000 people — up from 580 in 2013 — thanks in no small part to its billionaire owner. Still, Buzbee said holding powerful people and institutions accountable is the Post’s most essential duty — and that includes Amazon and any other venture Bezos may be involved in. So how does Bezos see his role at the Post?

“I mean, I think the easiest way to answer that is that I don’t have day-to-day contact. I mean, my boss is the publisher and definitely have day-to-day contact with him, but not really having day-to-day contact with the owner.”

After reminding Buzbee of something she’d said when she was at the Associated Press — “We have made a decision we don’t want to turn people off by using so much emotion that they won’t look at the veracity of the factual information” — Swisher followed up with a more general question: “Has news become too infused with emotion?”

“I don’t know that it’s too infused with emotion because I do think that human emotion is a critically important part of journalism. I want to make sure, though, that what we’re doing is fairly reflecting a lot of different perspectives in our journalism. I do think that we don’t want to — I don’t want to be snarky in our journalism. I don’t want people to think this is just a bunch of people who have this opinion or this viewpoint all talking to each other. I do want to make sure that our journalism is accessible to people. And by that, I don’t just mean told in a certain way. I mean that people feel that the facts are front and center in what we present to them.”

Here’s Buzbee on … not wanting racists to read The Washington Post but also wanting the widest possible audience?

“Well, I think our goal is to not turn off — I mean, I don’t want to give up on any reader. I mean, certainly, there are people who are not going to trust The Washington Post but I don’t think we want to give up on big swaths of the world. I mean, we’re certainly not trying to — I’m not interested in people who are racist reading The Washington Post. But I also, I don’t think we want to give up on — if we do good journalism, I want that journalism to get the widest audience it can.”

Earlier this month, The Washington Post took the unusual step of removing large portions of two articles about the so-called Steele dossier. The Post also added an editor’s note, changed a headline, and removed a video from its coverage. Buzbee ran through what led up to the changes — in short, a source said new information gave them doubts about what they’d told the Post in 2017 — and said they could no longer stand by the information in the story.

Buzbee: “We tried to be as transparent as possible, to explain in the editor’s notes what we were doing and why we were doing it. But I think we felt that as journalists, if there is new information that changes something that we said in the past and that makes it no longer true, we have to deal with that … Based on what I know at the time when the dossier came out, the Post was very skeptical and extremely sort of probing and cautious in dealing with that material. The Post never published the entire contents of the dossier or anything like that, OK?”

Swisher: “I got it. You’re not BuzzFeed. You didn’t BuzzFeed it.”

Buzbee on transparency from the legacy newsroom:

“I think that the people who read our journalism want us to sort of tell them what our standards are and to kind of explain how we do our journalism. I sense a lot of hunger for that.”

The Post has seen a number of high-profile clashes between reporters and newsroom leadership over social media posts in recent years. Swisher asked Buzbee, “What is your line for what’s appropriate for reporters?”

“The way I think about this is that it’s obviously normal for reporters to want to bring sort of their whole selves, who they are, their identity, to the reporting that they do. That’s completely natural. Each of us is the people we are, as we do our jobs. And I also want to bring that into their reporting. Someone who’s different from me might think of a different story idea than I think of. And every person is going to bring their perspective. And that’s going to enrich our journalism. And then we have to balance that against doing things that can cause people to think that we, as an institution, are biased in certain ways or that we have opinions as an institution. And that means that in some ways, that harms their willingness to talk to us for stories …

I think what we are trying to do is ensure that we’re not giving people signals that we’re biased against — that we don’t have political opinions, that we’re not coming down and that they can’t trust our journalism because of x, y, or z. That’s the balance that I would try to find.”

On how she’s thinking about the Post’s relationship with tech companies, starting with Twitter, which just announced a subscription service that allows readers to see ad-free articles on more than 300 news sites, including the Post.

“We have conversations about what makes sense for us in terms of mission and what makes sense for us in terms of, is this benefiting our desire to get audience? I mean, we’re a subscription-based news organization, right? I mean, we want people to care enough about us to pay to get our journalism, right? And that’s a mission I’m really comfortable with. I mean, good information takes really smart journalists to get. And it needs to have an economic model behind it. So when we deal with the tech companies, we look at each of these individually. Is this something we should try? Is this something we should consider? Or does it not make sense for us?”

You can listen to the episode or read the full transcript here.

“I love waking up [in LA] every morning,” Merida, who was named executive editor of the LA Times in May, told Richard Tofel, the former president of ProPublica, in a panel at the Texas Tribune Festival on Thursday. “It’s sunny, it’s beautiful, my mood lifts — the psychology of it!”

While Tofel had asked about the differences in the two papers “besides location,” it is partly location, Merida said, that makes the opportunity at the LA Times exciting. (Merida was The Washington Post’s managing editor before leaving to become editor-in-chief of ESPN’s The Undefeated in 2015.)

I’m gonna first just talk about the location. Where we’re centered. We’ve been doing a series called “The United States of California,” which talks about how California is a state of innovation in so many different ways. It’s where things start.

I was on vacation and met somebody at the same resort. She happened to be running a foundation that was in California and said she thought that there was so much possibility in Los Angeles, that Los Angeles was to the 21st century what New York was to the 20th century, and that it was the place where people were coming, the place the country was headed.

We’re in a great location. If you were going to try to redefine the modern newspaper and said, Where can I do that? Where can I really experiment with what a newspaper is? — You’d say: I got it. The perfect place is Los Angeles.

So many people are coming here and there are so many people who live here of different ethnicities and backgrounds. Technological advances for media, the changing media ecosystem, the streaming wars, entertainment — it’s all centered here. …

We’re in perhaps the most exciting city in the country in arguably the most important state in the country. The LA Times is smaller [than the Post], and in some ways when you are smaller you can be nimbler. You can move faster, you can try things easier. We don’t have to turn around a whole big ship. We can try things. And I think we will experiment aggressively and fearlessly.

Newspaper as straitjacket

Tofel mentioned that, in a conversation between them prior to the one at the conference, Merida had described the concept of a newspaper as a “straitjacket.”

Merida:

I spent 40, 41 years in newspapers and I came in reading The Washington Post as a kid. They’re beautifully curated things. When Jeff Bezos first bought the Post, [he was talking about] the marvel of just the curation — that every day, there’s a hierarchy that human beings put together, a physical newspaper, that has an architecture to it. It’s amazing that it comes out every day.

[But] a lot of the people — including my sons, both of their parents are newspaper people! — do not immediately gravitate [toward it], say, well, let me go and get myself a newspaper subscription!

We have to understand that there’s a generation that didn’t grow up with the paper being dropped on the doorstep, feeling that the newspaper is the way they need to get their information. I’m just talking about the term “newspaper.” We have to account for that everybody did not grow up with that habit, everybody does not think that [to get] “news,” that to be informed, requires them to get a newspaper subscription.

We have to change how people think about a newspaper. We’re here to engage them in all kinds of storytelling — storytelling that happens in the world where they consume it.

People now consume sports in so many different ways — multiple different screens. They have a second-, third-screen experience with it. There are fantasy sports leagues. Entire bars that are targeted for specific fandom around teams. There’s just a whole ecosystem of the way people consume [sports].

We have to recognize that and account for it [for news] … We have to tell people, look, we do a lot more than you think and we’re essential to your lives. We can make it so that what you need and what you want come together and it’s worth it to you to pay for us, the same way you might pay for Netflix or ESPN+.

“Other things to put inside your mind”

The biggest thing he learned as editor-in-chief of The Undefeated, Merida said, was “that there are a lot of ways to reach audiences.” At the helm of The Undefeated, he explained, he was largely starting from scratch and building culture rather than coming into an existing one.

As Los Angeles Magazine reported on Wednesday, when Merida took over at The Undefeated, that publication was “mired in reports of a toxic work environment under original editor in chief Jason Whitlock.” And within five years, Merida was able to help turn things around enough that the site “was scoring speakers like Barack Obama for its events, its journalism was winning industry awards, and it had entered book publishing and music production.” Needless to say, The Undefeated was a different atmosphere from the one at The Washington Post, where he worked for more than 20 years.

There are brilliant people in [The Washington Post’s] newsroom, but most of my life was confined inside that newsroom. And as smart as everybody is inside that newsroom, there are a lot of smart people outside the newsroom, too. You need to have other ways to expand your mind — other things to put inside your mind. […]

How do we create entry points to journalism that are beyond simply what we write — the stories we write and edit and publish digitally and in the newspaper? Is there an entire way to bring people to it through social content creation, just the way that people engage on TikTok and Instagram and Twitch and other platforms? Can we get audiences to look at our work differently?

And not everybody who creates content for the LA Times will want to be employed there, Merida said.

There are opportunities to do original work and to partner with people who may not have a Los Angeles Times badge. They may not want to be employed by the LA Times. But they may be doing something really interesting. They may want to periodically write for us. They may want to produce for us. They may want to do things with us, but not be an LA Times employee. There’s a whole world of creative people out there.

“My early mentors were people who were breaking down the doors and trying to fight for more inclusion”

Merida is the second Black executive editor of the LA Times, but “there’s never been a Latino editor in a city where Latinos outnumber non-Hispanic whites and outnumber Blacks by more than 3 to 1,” Tofel said. “How, in your judgment, has the LA Times been doing serving its Latino audience and covering the Latino community?”

The LA Times currently employees perhaps the largest number of Latino journalists of any daily in the country, Merida said — about 100 in a newsroom of 550.

“Which is not to say that we are where we need to be. We have a Latino population that’s roughly half of the county of Los Angeles. There’s a lot we know we need to do and we’ll continue to be aggressive about that. I’m glad we have a lot of tremendous Latino journalists bc they can help me. They can help me figure out what to do to keep pushing forward. It’s central to who we are at the LA Times, and where we need to go, and what we need to become.

The representation has always been important to me. Inclusion, empowerment, visibility, they always have been core to me. My early mentors were people who were breaking down the doors and trying to fight for more inclusion. People like Bob Maynard and Nancy Hicks Maynard and others who started the Maynard Institute and, before that, the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, which I’m a graduate of.

Part of my orientation in this profession has been to push for more inclusion and representation. We need more Latino journalists in the ranks of management and throughout the entire place. That is certainly on my mind, coming in and working at the Los Angeles Times.”

Kevin Merida and Richard Tofel’s conversation at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival is available online if you buy a festival ticket.

So very honored to officially be part of the @PostOpinions “Voices Across America” team, an initiative that highlights a diverse group of writers and their diverse take on the news from all corners of the U.S. https://t.co/vTZwvrZG5k

— Fernanda Santos (@ByFernandaS) June 1, 2021

Voices Across America will feature pieces from contributing columnists like Lizette Alvarez in Miami, Florida; Kate Cohen in Albany, New York; Fernanda Santos in Phoenix, Arizona; and Bill Whalen in Palo Alto, California. The opinion section is also looking for contributing writers and new columnists.

Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Post, said Voices Across America is one of a few ways the Post has tried to reach new audiences and gain new writers. The section gets at least 100 op-ed submissions a day and the team reads each one. Last year, the opinion section conducted a racial and gender diversity audit of its writers and found that it “should be doing better,” Hiatt said. The Post declined to provide more information on the audit and said it’s made diversity a focus in hiring and finding outside voices.

In 2016, The Post launched its Global Opinions section to reach readers with interests outside of the United States. It went a step further in 2019 when it launched “Post Opinión,” a Spanish-language section that publishes original and translated op-eds. In December 2019, it launched the Spanish-language news podcast “El Washington Post” with twice-weekly episodes.

Publications — both national and local — are experimenting with how to reinvent their opinion pages and make them more relevant to readers. This past March, McClatchy announced it would add community advisory boards to each opinion team. At The New York Times, editor Kathleen Kingsbury cut publishing volume by 25 to 30%. (At the Times, some change was inspired following the publication of an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas who called for the government to “send in the troops” to quash Black Lives Matter protests.)

In the past, the Post has found that subscribers consume opinion writing more than non-subscribers. The topics of opinion pieces that most often lead readers to subscribe are politics, race and reckoning, and coronavirus coverage, as well as exclusive guest pieces.

“We have always been totally committed to a diversity of viewpoints in our opinion writers, our regular columnists, and in our contributors,” Hiatt said. “We intend to have people writing from red states and blue states, about red states and blue states, so that things that are happening in different parts of the country won’t come as a surprise to folks who are living in Washington or Hollywood if we’re doing our job right.”

For Voices Across America, Hiatt wants to find writers who can write about where they live with sufficient authority to be credible to their neighbors and with “sufficient altitude” to be compelling to readers anywhere.

“We want writers in these places to be writing about any subject, not just their region,” Hiatt said, “but from a point of view that reflects where they live, so that we’re not just reading about politics from Washington, or immigration or deindustrialization or Covid or any other topic from the inside-the-Beltway perspective.”

On Friday, the Post will announce an opinion-based podcast called “Please, Go On” to give writers more space to discuss the issues they’ve written about, in a booming medium. The first episode will premiere next week on June 11.

The podcast will be hosted by James Hohmann, an opinion columnist for The Post who was previously a national political correspondent and the voice behind the morning news briefing, The Big Idea podcast.

“We publish a lot of op-eds that make a lot of news that people talk about and are really interested in, and often they want to know how it came about or why we published that or why did that writer want to speak at this particular moment,” Hiatt said. “It’s partly this thing that we all want to do which is demystify what we do, make ourselves more transparent, and invite readers and listeners who are interested into the process.”

Each week, Hohmann and the guest will delve into the week’s most compelling column. Writers are often governed by a word count but they always have more to say. The podcast will let them elaborate and allow The Post to bring listeners and readers into the conversation.

“James is going to be talking to people with varying points of view. He’s going to be pressing them to explain themselves and to go deeper, and in some cases, he’s going to be challenging them,” Hiatt said. “It will be a model of the kind of debate and discussion that we need more of and that I think a lot of people are hungry for.”

The conference gathered top editors — and one prominent, opinionated Substacker — to discuss the growth of opinion in online journalism. There to talk about the proliferation was Karen Attiah, global opinions editor for The Washington Post; Sewell Chan, editorial page editor at The Los Angeles Times; Katie Kingsbury, opinion editor for The New York Times; and Matthew Yglesias, a writer and editor who left Vox to launch his Substack, Slow Boring. ISOJ said it was the first time the conference had explored online opinion journalism in its 22-year history.

“Ours is a very narrative era,” Chan said in opening remarks. “The power of storytelling is driving everything that we’re seeing in media, regardless of the medium — the podcast boom, newsletters, video. The voice and the opinionated voice are more powerful than ever before.”

Here are a couple of our takeaways.

“Why don’t we let people speak for themselves?”

The editors each called a particular subset of op-ed contributor something different — “professors,” “the interpreter class,” “think tankers” — but agreed they were actively trying to create more space for different types of writers, who draw on different forms of authority, than have been featured in the past.

The impulse is not entirely new. Early feedback on The New York Times op-ed page singled out the section’s “propensity towards ‘names'” and running too “much junk by the famous.” (The New York Times editorial page editor John B. Oakes, who first envisioned the op-ed page, warned specifically against scholars and professors. “Ivory tower equals ivory head,” he quipped.) Resisting the temptation to publish “names” hasn’t gotten easier, but with the ability to publish more perspectives online, it may make for a richer section as a whole.

“I think op-ed pages have become more interesting, in part, because, at least at our page, we are trying to move away from the traditional reliance on elected officials [and] policy experts,” Chan said. “There’s still room for professors and scholars — they are a big part of what we publish still — but we’re increasingly searching for the real voices of people’s authentic, lived experiences, which is oftentimes as important a form of authority, as traditional research scholarship.”

At The Washington Post, Attiah said she was stacking her section with bylines from people actually living in the countries they were commenting on.

“There was a push on my part to push back against what I would call the interpreter class, particularly in Washington, where you have foreign correspondents and think tankers tasked very often to explain [foreign events] to us,” Attiah said. “Why don’t we just let people from the countries, from these cultures, speak for themselves about what’s going on in their country?”

Going local, going global

There was a divide between the regional news organization focused on serving the country’s most populous state and county – and the national publications eyeing an international audience.

Like other regional papers, The Los Angeles Times is moving toward “an ethos of community and service,” Chan said.

“Here at The LA Times, I’m really focused on trying to promote and publish the broadest array of California perspectives as possible, knowing that nationally-known politicians and characters and commentators are already amply reflected in the pages of national publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal,” Chan said. “What we can do to try to restore trust and community at the local and state level is an issue that interests me a great deal.”

Attiah said that, at The Washington Post, they were casting the net much wider, and trying to “cultivate and court and appeal to international audiences,” including English speakers in India, Europe, and Africa.

“The digital marketplace is a global marketplace,” Attiah noted.

Attiah — who edited the late Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and Virginia resident who was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — said her section could be “a refuge” for activists and writers barred from speaking freely in their own countries.

“Being an American newspaper, we’re trying to be a home for international writers,” she said. “We often are getting writers who have not had opportunities or a voice in their countries, whether it’s due to authoritarian governments or something else.”

What readers want

Kingsbury presented some reader research that had driven recent changes at The New York Times’ opinion section, including renaming op-eds “guest essays” and expanding biographies for contributors.

“[Readers] crave more differentiation, clarity, and context,” she said. “In particular, they want to better understand when and why we’re publishing outside writers.”

Opinion content — whether “guest essays” or editorials written in-house — have long drawn on original reporting and sources cultivated by the opinion writers. But readers, Kingsbury said, are starting to see more of that themselves.

“When I arrived, the Times very, very rarely quoted people in [editorials],” she said. “We have to gain trust with readers at every turn, so that is something that we emphasize: showing our work and trying to be more transparent.”

Readers also want a certain amount of curation, the group agreed. The acceptance rate for outside op-eds at major publications hovers in the low single digits, and opinion sections spend a lot of time and effort on standards given the flood of pitches coming across their desks.

“I wouldn’t suggest that anybody, like, browse Substack,” Yglesias said, at one point. “It’s a lot of people out there op-ed-ing and writing and doing whatever.”

Both legacy and independent writers have to work to differentiate themselves from commentators on cable news and armchair experts on social media, Yglesias noted.

“Our question as people who are trying to be professionals and trying to build businesses that are grounded in opinion, is, ‘How do you differentiate yourself from this maw of opinions that are constantly being voiced out there on social?'” he said. “I think you hear all of us on the panel talking about different ways to do that.”

Fact-checking, editing, and elevating different — and differing — opinions are all part of “a business strategy,” Attiah said.

“Our pages, in many ways, are facing competition from right-wing media, individual Facebook accounts, social media accounts, and other alternative forms of voices and viewpoints,” she said. “I think our challenge is to add value. We add value to the conversation with fact-checking, editing, and inclusion. I think we’re realizing that inclusion of various voices is not only a luxury, but an imperative. If we are going to remain relevant and [continue] adding value, we have to continue to uphold these standards.”

Looking ahead, Attiah also said an important shift for opinion sections would be thinking not just about developing writers, but developing audiences.

“There’s a lot more understanding of the importance of digital communities and audiences, what those conversations are like, and how our journalism fits into them,” she said. “It’s more of an audience-first ethos. I think legacy [media] is sort of like, ‘Oh gosh, audience editors really matter? Social media really matters?’ We’re catching up — quickly, I think — to what people are interested in that doesn’t have to do with traditional left-right politics.”

If you want to listen to the entire panel, ISOJ is posting recordings of its events on YouTube, including the one headlined by opinion editors.

James Hohmann, who launched the newsletter in 2015 and will move to the opinion section after Inauguration Day, was the author of The Daily 202. Knox, though, will take over as “anchor” and “host.”

A Washington Post spokesperson says “author” and “anchor” are “used interchangeably” in the newsroom. (Other newsletter authors at the Post use “anchor” in their bios.) But the rechristening does seem to be part of a growing trend. Back in April, The New York Times announced that David Leonhardt would be the “new writer, host and anchor of The Morning, our rebranded flagship newsletter.” And over at The Los Angeles Times, Ryan Faughnder will be the “host” of a new entertainment business newsletter, The Wide Shot.

What to make of the title changes? Nieman Lab’s own Joshua Benton had a few ideas when the switch was announced at The New York Times.

Look at that title. “Writer, host, and anchor of our flagship newsletter.” Host and anchor are the language of TV, which I’m sure isn’t accidental; morning shows have used the personal connection between anchor and viewer, reinforced daily, to build extraordinarily profitable businesses. (The three network morning shows generated more than $800 million in ad revenue in 2018.)

Benton points out that Washington Post editor Marty Baron wrote in a staff memo (after the Felicia Sonmez incident) that “The Post is more than a collection of individuals who wish to express themselves…The reputation of The Post must prevail over any one individual’s desire for expression.”

But The Post can’t have missed the success The New York Times has seen with The Daily, which foregrounds lots of individual reporters but none more than the show’s host Michael Barbaro. Benton pulled a few highlights:

The Daily is probably the most successful new product the Times has launched since the paywall in 2011. (Sorry, Cooking.) We’re talking a billion downloads successful, No. 1 podcast in the United States successful, three-quarters-of-listeners-under-40 successful. When you have execs saying things like “The Daily is the modern front page of The New York Times” and “The Daily is a monster hit with an astonishingly valuable audience, and it just continues to grow,” you’re onto something.

Why is The Daily such a success? Lots of reasons, but perhaps its most distinguishing one is how it foregrounds the personalities — the person-ness, really — of Times reporters. The star, of course, is host Michael Barbaro, the Virgil guiding listeners through the newsroom’s nine circles. But the other Times reporters that Barbaro interviews are also rendered realer than bylines. Combine that with the intimacy of audio and you’ve got something that has created a morning news ritual for millions.

Knox — who hosted a live, three-hour show every weeknight for SiriusXM — has plenty of experience with audio and he’s taking the reins during a period of growth for The Daily 202, which the Post said experienced a 20 percent increase in readership in the last year. (The Daily 202 is one of the Post’s most popular newsletters, with a readership in the “hundreds of thousands.” The 202 newsletter franchise — named after the area code for Washington, D.C. — has grown to include newsletters focused on political and policy happenings in technology, healthcare, and more.)

Knox told Axios that he expects to continue features like “The Big Idea” section that current Daily 202 subscribers see each day.

And will the Daily 202 become a podcast in the vein of NYT’s The Daily? “We don’t have specific plans to share just yet,” the Post’s spokesperson told me. “But we hope to capitalize on Olivier’s audio expertise.” 

The Washington Post announces @OKnox will anchor The Daily 202 flagship political newsletter, taking over after inauguration. https://t.co/SzcSQ7nKQ8

— Washington Post PR (@WashPostPR) January 5, 2021

The DC newsletter wars continue: WaPo is hiring @OKnox to “anchor The Daily 202, The Post’s flagship politics newsletter on the inner-workings of Washington politics and policy.” https://t.co/wHPlKNzQok

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 5, 2021

Amazing news. While I’ll miss @oknox’s dulcet tones on my radio, having his insights in my inbox will more than make up for it. As we (hopefully) transition back to a less sensationalist, more nuanced world of politics, there’s no better guide. https://t.co/Rn1xTbIYLv

— @DukeStJournal (@DukeStJournal) January 5, 2021

What a good hire/match of writer and job — welcome to newslettersville @OKnox https://t.co/XzoRy7uWek

— Chris Suellentrop (@suellentrop) January 5, 2021

It seems unlikely that most people would say yes. But that sort of tracking, in digital form, lies at the heart of the online advertising industry. It’s just that, by and large, advertisers and developers haven’t been required to ask you whether you’re cool with it. They signed your name on your behalf.

Apple has announced plans to change that. And after much uproar, today the company announced it was hitting pause on those plans. Here’s Bloomberg’s Apple oracle, Mark Gurman:

Apple Inc. is delaying a change to its upcoming iOS 14 iPhone software that Facebook Inc. and other developers have warned would hurt their advertising businesses.

The move, announced in June, requires users to give explicit permission before letting apps track them for advertising purposes. This was due to be implemented this fall with the rollout of iOS 14. It is now being delayed until early next year, Apple said on Thursday.

“We want to give developers the time they need to make the necessary changes, and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year,” Apple said in a statement.

The company added that the feature will still be implemented when iOS 14 is released, but the delay means it won’t enforce the rule and require developers to adopt it. Apple said it will release more details on implementing the feature later this year.

At issue is a unique code that’s attached to every iPhone and iPad called its IDFA. At its June developers conference, Apple announced that iOS would soon start asking users to allow that sort of tracking — in every app and website whose adtech stack uses it. Few expect most iPhone users to agree happily. With this one move, Apple — whose software runs on roughly half of American phones — slices up the network of data that connects you to your online history. (That Apple is the largest tech company with essentially zero reliance on ad dollars gives it a strategy credit here.)

Facebook, for one, is not a fan of the move, but says the impact will be felt more by the game and app developers who use its ad network than by Facebook itself. (The sprawl of Facebook properties across your homescreen leaves it plenty of ways to track you within its walls.)

But publishers are bracing for an impact too. As the Journal’s Lukas I. Alpert and Patience Haggin put it:

Some publishers worry that most users will opt out, hobbling their ability to show personalized ads in apps and dealing them a blow at a time when the industry is trying to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. “When every publisher is fighting for every last advertising cent, this couldn’t come at a worse time,” said Martin Clarke, publisher of DMG Media, operator of the Daily Mail and MailOnline…

Sheri Bachstein, the global head of consumer business at the Weather Co., which operates weather.com, estimated that the price advertisers are willing to pay to advertise within iPhone apps could decline by as much as 40% as a result of the change. That is because advertisers generally pay a premium for ads targeted based on users’ interests and behavior on the web. Apple says it doesn’t plan to prohibit tracking, but will simply require app makers to obtain permission from their users to do so.

Apple’s new policy was set to go into force with the release of the next version of its mobile operating system, iOS 14, which is expected in the coming weeks. (iOS updated usually come out in September along a new batch of iPhones, but Covid-related factors will likely push that into October this year.) With today’s announcement of a delay, though, D-Day will now come in 2021.

Many news publishers will struggle to adapt; few have the sort of robust data systems that would allow them to create something like the ad targeting Apple would be limiting. Publishers who sell most of their own advertising directly will have an edge over those who rely on programmatic ad networks. In the long run, that’s probably a healthy tradeoff for publishers — but there’ll be pain in the meantime.

One likely winner: The New York Times, which decided months ago to phase out all third-party ad tools in favor of its own inhouse data stack. The Times will let advertisers target 45 or more audience segments, defined by its own data. That’s great for the Times and other big dogs, like The Washington Post and Vox Media, who have the tech capacity to pull this off. But it’ll be harder for smaller fry.

One impact I’d expect to see from this: more news sites tightening their registration walls, requiring drive-by readers to create and log into an account to see even a single news story. The Times and McClatchy, among others, have moved in this direction in the past year; it’s awfully hard to gather good targeting data as a publisher without having your readers logged in and identified. (Sorry, incognito-window fans: Your paywall-evading days may be numbered.)

To help address some of these issues, The Post in February tasked a group of National Desk staffers with writing a report analyzing the paper’s social media policy. The committee surveyed more than 50 Post reporters and ultimately found “near universal desire for a policy that is clearer and more specific about staffers’ responsibilities and limitations in using social media, as well as management’s obligations to employees’ security and equitable enforcement of the rules.” The report was leaked to Ben Smith, the media columnist at The New York Times and former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, and he shared it on Twitter on Monday.

Reporters also complain of a "two-tiered system" in which "white, male reporters often get away with potentially problematic messages, while female and minority colleagues are not given the benefit of the doubt" pic.twitter.com/RAVrGyVbYW

— Ben Smith (@benyt) June 8, 2020

What reporters on social media get, but which many of their editors still don't: “Something that is not a violation cannot become a violation because a lot of people got mad about it." Assuming good faith among all online critics grants a heckler's veto to the least fair of them. https://t.co/gbBnb4G2CU

— Rob Pegoraro (@robpegoraro) June 8, 2020

The document — which the Post said on Monday is “part of a broader conversation we’ve been having throughout the newsroom about our use of social media” — is worth reading in full. Here are some highlights:

The committee has four major recommendations:
1. Redefine our purpose on social media.
2. Do more to acknowledge the abuse the staff confronts online — and make clear that the company will stand behind its employees when they are attacked.
3. Create a more transparent enforcement process that emphasizes best practices.
4. Reset the newsroom culture.

Expressing identity and personal experience can be particularly treacherous for certain reporters, as some aspects of personal identity are viewed as inherently political or controversial in our society, such as race and gender. “When you are a member of certain groups, assumptions are made,” one reporter said. Identifying as a member of a marginalized group “has opened me up to specific accusations of bias.”

This creates greater uncertainty and vulnerability for reporters who share personal experiences related to being a woman, LGBTQ, a person of color or an immigrant. For some of them, it’s unclear at what point sharing personal experience veers into what editors feel is bias. “I look at Astead Herndon at the New York Times. It’s clear that Astead’s identity is a whole part of what he writes,” another reporter said. “If I tweeted something he tweeted — it feels too far for me. But if it’s not [too far in The Post’s point of view], I’d like to know that.”

Some reporters who have been targeted on social media said editors have never asked how they were doing amid mob attacks. They generally do not feel supported by their bosses — or even their coworkers — in times of duress. They seek a culture where they can safely ask their editors or colleagues if they messed up and learn from the experience.

One reporter said, “The few times I had a story blow up, I’ve never had an editor reach out and say, ‘Hey, I see what’s happening, are you OK?’ or ‘I wrote that headline; I didn’t realize it’d be read like that on Twitter. Do you want to talk this out?’” […]

Women and people of color are particularly vulnerable. During the 2016 campaign, a female reporter’s cell phone number was leaked, resulting in harassing calls day and night, including while at home with her family. She received “really, really awful emails,” and the tormenters wrote negative things about her online that still come up in searches of her name. The reporter’s editors were compassionate, but management’s only advice was to keep hitting “block caller.”
“I don’t remember that being super helpful,” the reporter said. “I didn’t think I needed [security] to come to my house, but what are the precautions to take and when should I tell someone if something is escalating?”

Many feel as though there is a two-tiered system allowing some reporters to tweet things that would get others in trouble. Reporters said that white, male reporters often get away with potentially problematic messages, while female and minority colleagues are not given the benefit of the doubt. “People who are stars get away with murder,” one person said. “It’s frustrating to me that I can see some of my male colleagues tweeting and Instagramming about drinking and going to parties and hanging out with politicos outside of the office and being chummy with other political reporters at other places, and that that’s OK,” another reporter said. “But that if a woman is being public about being a sexual assault survivor or a reporter of color calls out problems that they see in our industry, that that’s not OK.”

While some reporters are comfortable using Twitter to share analysis on their beats, others said they feel undue pressure to use social media to bolster their standing as The Post’s expert on a topic.

“Because I’m not as active on Twitter anymore, I’m not booked on TV as much,” one reporter said. “If you take away the temptation of Twitter, you also kind of make yourself less visible. From a career standpoint, you’re weighing back and forth the pros and cons of that.”

Reporters said they often see competitors on the same beat publish Tweet threads with analyses on high-profile incidents, even when the analysis does not appear on the competitor’s website. But it is widely shared, generates attention for the competitor and bolsters their standing as an expert on the topic. Some reporters said they feel uncomfortable with this and prefer to publish content on The Washington Post’s website rather than a Tweet thread.

“Is that what The Post wants us to do?” one reporter asked. “I think it’s problematic because it puts you in a situation where you are commenting.”

Editors often assign stories based on what is trending and what competitors or sources are saying on Twitter. When editors “flag” tweets or mention observations from Twitter during meetings, some reporters feel they are receiving mixed messages — they’re told they don’t need to be on Twitter to be successful in their jobs, but they’re expected to monitor everything their competitors and sources are tweeting.

“It drives me crazy that editors say, ‘If you feel maybe you shouldn’t tweet something, then err on the side of not tweeting it’[or] ‘Twitter is a cesspool, an echo chamber,’ and you see them sitting at their desks just refreshing Tweetdeck all day long,” one reporter said. “It sometimes can feel like an internal Slack channel.”

A climate reporter said, “It’s a fact that carbon pricing is what we need to help stem a warming globe, but that would be considered political. That’s made more difficult by political parties who reject the truth as truth. We need to consider how that affects us on social media.”

The full memo is here.

Things have, uh, changed. But The 19th is still planning to launch this summer and has started doing some reporting earlier than planned.

“We had a moment in early March where we took stock of where we were,” Ramshaw, cofounder and CEO of The 19th and former editor of the Texas Tribune, told me this week. “We have money in the bank, but not much more is gonna come in any time soon. Should we just hunker down, delay the launch, and ride out this storm? For a hot second, that was our plan. But then it became abundantly clear that in virtually every arena except for mortality rates, women were going to be disproportionately affected by this pandemic…We had to stay engaged and, in some ways, speed up our plans.”

My conversation with Ramshaw, lightly condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

The COVID-19 crisis both threatens and promises to reshuffle business and societal thinking about the role of local news in the 2020s. Call it pandemic panic. The crisis has clearly accelerated the known drivers of industry change worldwide. That could well lead to more consolidation of newspapers and more hedge fund and private equity control.

This earth-trembling change has also raised some new possibilities. What if the platforms finally do give in to decade-long pressures to pay publishers for news? What if governments, in one of the many ways being discussed, actually funneled funding to pay journalists to do local journalism? What if new and more public-spirited buyers/owners emerged, buying up papers that only bottom-feeding financial buyers have seen fit to acquire?

Keep those big-picture possibilities in mind as we first delve back into the important (but by now a little mundane) world of daily newspaper M&A.

But there are those 20 undisclosed parties crunching McClatchy’s numbers. They may well include some names familiar to those who have followed the Consolidation Games of the last year and a half.

Conventional wisdom holds that the New Gannett can’t play. After all, it’s already burdened by the $1.8 billion in debt it took on to put together its GateHouse merger in November. But what about its lender, Apollo Global Management? Insiders have told me that Apollo has been talking with Gannett CEO Mike Reed about a structuring of their five-year deal, given the immense and immediate impact of the coronavirus crisis on cash flow.

Could Apollo — which strategized a newspaper industry rollup back in 2015 when it almost bought Digital First Media — decide that a 2020s version would make financial sense? For the financial companies — Apollo, Chatham, Alden Global Capital, Gannett manager Fortress Investment Group — it’s all about the numbers.

One critical question for them: How do you value McClatchy’s cash flow over the next few years at a time when projections even six months out are deeply uncertain? Industry consultant FTI is now forecasting that 1 in 5 pre-COVID ad dollars might not come back to newspaper companies once this pandemic nightmare concludes. (Though annual ad revenue declines not much smaller than that have become numbingly common at newspaper companies in recent years.)

Another question: How much in the way of corporate overhead and general centralization synergies could be wrung by merging McClatchy into the new Gannett? Such a move would create a behemoth newspaper company (to the extent newspaper companies can be behemoths anymore), controlling about a third of U.S. daily print circulation in more than 160 cities. If the numbers add up, could Apollo end up owing that giant?

Given the many steps that would take and all the vagaries of future cash flow, most financial observers consider that unlikely — at least in the short term.

Quietly, the Alden/Tribune merger moves forward

And then there’s Alden. As we’ve reported, Alden is on a trajectory to takeover/merge with Tribune Publishing this year. Our most recent datapoint:

Tucked inside the company’s April 8 notice of its annual meeting — which of course will be virtual — is this:

Nominees for Director: The Board of Directors has nominated the six individuals listed below for election as directors at the Annual Meeting. All nominees are currently serving as directors of the Company. Ms. [Dana Goldsmith] Needleman and Mr. [Christopher] Minnetian were both appointed to the Board of Directors pursuant to the Cooperation Agreement dated as of December 1, 2019 by and among the Company, Alden Global Opportunities Master Fund, L.P. and Alden Global Value Recovery Master Fund, L.P. (the “Cooperation Agreement”).

It sounds like the usual corporate filing-speak. 

But what’s omitted is the big story. The board currently has eight members, but it’s only nominating six.

David Dreier, who served as the board’s chairman until Alden’s rapid insertion into the company’s affairs six months ago, isn’t being re-nominated. Neither is Eddy Hartenstein, also a former board chair and long-serving board member, as well as former publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times Media Group. Both of them received criticism for their acquiescence to Michael Ferro’s Tronckist regime, but both have also been considered relative Tribune Publishing stalwarts, advocates of local journalism.

After Alden bought up Tribune stock late last year, one of its demands was that Tribune grow its board from six to eight members by adding the Alden-affiliated Minnetian and Needleman. Now it’s dropping back to six, with the two Alden picks sticking around.

The arithmetic is clear. Alden’s Heath Freeman — already exerting great influence at Tribune, which dispatched CEO Tim Knight and pushed forward with significant job cuts pre-COVID — is lining up the company for a merger with his own MNG Enterprises. Observers expect that the soon-to-be-reduced Tribune board will move to “explore the best use of its assets.” Then, most likely, would come the appointment of an “independent” board group (without the would-be-conflicted Alden 2), who would then lead a sales process. The likeliest result: a merger, in some form, between Tribune Publishing and Alden’s MNG Enterprises.

(The NewsGuild, which represents newsroom staff at the Chicago Tribune and several other Tribune Publishing papers, is promising a fight. This week, it announced a proxy fight aimed at getting the two Alden directors off the board, questioning whether “their interests are aligned with those of Tribune Publishing.”)

What might that increasingly likely deal mean for a possible further merger with McClatchy?

In its bankruptcy filings, McClatchy has acknowledged what I’ve reported over the past couple of years: multiple failed efforts to merge with Tribune. If Alden wasn’t circling around Chicago, those who know the companies well believe a Tribune/McClatchy combination would make a lot of sense. Both focus on larger metro markets, as opposed to the smaller towns at the core of Gannett. They’ve had similar editorial philosophies and business strategies over time.

The thinking now is that an Alden/Tribune tie-up would foreclose a merger with a post-bankrupt McClatchy. Maybe that’s true — maybe Chatham, if and when it becomes McClatchy’s controlling owner, will just operate it for a while.

Or maybe not. Too much is up the air here. But watch the timing.

An Alden/Tribune merger would likely be announced sometime after it slims its board — its annual meeting is May 21 — and goes through that “exploration” and “process.” That might mean a merger announcement in June or July — the same time when we expect McClatchy to emerge from bankruptcy.

Someone’s taking away chairs

My expectation requires a new metaphor. The Consolidation Games are adding a new event, musical chairs. The industry’s music has slowed, its cash flow down to an adagio. The number of chairs for CEOs decreases by the month, as mergers take what had been independent newspaper chains — most with long histories of civic mission — and turn them into tradable financial assets harvested for short-term gain.

Not long ago — like, last October — a list of the major American newspaper chains would have included Gannett, GateHouse, MediaNews (MNG), Tribune, McClatchy, Berkshire Hathaway Media, and Lee.

GateHouse bought Gannett and then took its name; Berkshire Hathaway loaned Lee the money to buy it out of the business. Depending on what happens with MNG, McClatchy, and Tribune, that list of 7 companies could be down to 4 or even 3 by year’s end. Collectively, the companies who remain would control well over 50% of daily circulation in the country.

Only one survivor, Lee, would still be controlled by “newspaper people,” and most of its papers are smaller; it has only four papers that sell more than 50,000 copies on weekdays (Buffalo, St. Louis, Omaha, and Richmond).

Of course it’s possible that new players might see this as the perfect time to enter the business. The price to buy a newspaper company has never been lower! Recession risk would scare away all but the deeply pocketed, deeply ambitious, and perhaps deeply political would-be acquirers away. It’s the Buffetts of the world who can afford to take a long-term view in such rough times — though even Buffett decries the current uncertainty and says he isn’t buying anything. (He wouldn’t be buying newspapers, anyway.)

So let’s consider one deeply pocketed, deeply political media player that I first mentioned as a possible newspaper industry entrant in January: Sinclair Broadcast Group.

“They’ve studied it,” says one source familiar with those conversations. “They believe that major cities will be served by a strong local news company — outputting to both video and text/print — and they believe that buying local newspapers is one way to get there.”

There are some clear hurdles, including the still-on-the-books rules against owning dominant newspaper and broadcast outlets in the same metro. But just three weeks ago, Sinclair was among those petitioning the Supreme Court to review an appeals court decision that had reinstated those rules after an FCC attempt at deregulation. There’s a good chance the court could relax those rules. Sinclair is based in Baltimore; it could be interested in The Baltimore Sun, should it break loose from Tribune or a Tribune/Alden merger. It could be interested in a lot of newspapers: Sinclair currently owns or operates 191 television stations in 89 markets.

Or will platform “licensing” revenue save the day?

Google and Facebook hire some of the best legal talent in the western world, and they’ve been able to swat away, delay, and skirmish interminably with the forces that demand they pay up for their use of news content. For more than two decades, newspaper companies around the world have wanted platforms to pay a license fee — like the ones the music industry and local TV stations get, say — for the snippets of news content they publish. They’ve been largely unsuccessful.

As the Google/Facebook duopoly has come to dominate the digital advertising business, and as the ad revenues of news publishers have fallen off a cliff, the intermittent cries have grown. Now, they’re joining in unison. Will they be able to pry loose big new revenue streams now?

I wouldn’t bet against the platforms — it’s usually not a winning bet — but there’s no doubt that executives in Mountain View and Sunnyvale know they now have a bigger problem on their hands.

In the last month alone, Australia and France have demanded payment. Canada is getting a full-court press for help from its publishers, including imposing new pressure on the platforms. “An urgent message to the Government of Canada from the publishers of Canada’s major newspapers” went out across the nation on Saturday, Canada’s big weekend newspaper day.

Most notably, U.S. publishers are also working — more quietly, but more aggressively — to get what they believe has long been due them. They’ve appreciated what largesse has been provided by both Google and Facebook in their multi-hundred-million-dollar journalism support programs, and they’ve recognized the many earnest people inside those companies who aim to offer local news a lifeline. But no one believes those grants are — or promise to be — the game-changer that society and their businesses require.

“This could be the year,” says one executive involved in the U.S. movement. “The stars may have aligned.”

Among those stars: The platforms have achieved something few others have: bipartisan questioning of their activities. Both Republican and Democratic politicians love to rail against Big Tech, whether they’re citing the 2016 election, misinformation in general, company efforts against misinformation, growing privacy concerns, monopolistic behavior, or the platforms’ impact on the system that long provided Americans local news.

More people have looked into the Black Mirror and haven’t liked what they’ve seen. Techlash 2020 — still powerful despite (or perhaps because) it’s the platforms who will likely weather the coronavirus downturn best — could result in a new stream of revenue to news publishers.

As I wrote in January, the payment issues of who, how, when, and where are gnarly ones. The platform can fairly cite that gnarliness. They also like to cite the humorous algo blindness they like to claim (“How would we ever figure out how to fairly attribute value to news producers?”) while they dodge, weave, and aim to make separate deals with the largest national/global news producers. Separating out the Timeses, Posts, Journals, and Guardians from the larger, bedraggled news herd is an classic divide-and-conquer strategy that’s long been one facet of the game. (Note Facebook’s payments to publishers for its News Tab — individual deals primarily targeting the top of the industry.)

Then, of course, there’s the irony that it’s the very financialization of the industry — the hedge funds and PE firms who stand to benefit directly from any aid to newspaper companies — may be the platforms’ best argument for opposing payments for content.

Alden president Heath Freeman’s recent “Dear Colleagues” letter, circulated by new New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, offers the perfect foil. “Fund vulture journalism?” the platforms can cry. “They’re worse than us!”

Indeed, look at the blowback big corporate players have faced if it comes out that they’ve taken bailout money. While this sort of platform payout wouldn’t quite be characterized as “bailout money,” the optics are less favorable for a news industry that is — at least in the U.S., and Canada — dominated by financial players.

We’re in this pandemic moment in which COVID-19 fears have unexpectedly revalued the sort of experienced, balanced reporting a good local news outlet can provide. And yet we’re stuck talking about the interaction of a few hedge funds, focused on little else beyond profit, and a few tech companies with unprecedented dominance.

Then there’s this to ponder: If Google and Facebook finally began paying for the supply chain of news — something akin to the retransmission-fee revenue stream that revolutionized the local TV business model — what would be the new value of these news companies? Pouring hundreds of millions, if not billions, into their revenue streams would have a real and significant effect. It could offset the profound loss of advertising and semi-stabilize companies that haven’t felt stable since 2007 or so. If that happened, how much more market-valuable would newspaper titles and newspaper companies become?

Factor that into your crystal ball and the “multiples” that newspaper companies might be “worth” produce a few new swirls of possibility. If cash flow were no longer projected to decline inexorably — if they were at least stable —would these old “newspaper” assets, their blackletter flags mostly digitized, become more valued businesses?

That is a big “if.” But it’s one more plausible than a year ago.

Finally, the will-platforms-pay-up question has at least two big implications. First, the money guys — the would-be buyers and consolidators like Alden, Apollo, or Chatham. Heath Freeman’s letter shows he sees the potential for major value creation if the platforms can be pushed to a deal. How does even the possibility of a big platform settlement figure into the immediate questions of consolidation — the ones that’ll be answered within just a few months?

Second, what about all the next-gen thinking in the local-news-revival world? Major foundations, the American Journalism Project, news entrepreneur Steve Waldman, and others advocate a reordering of local news. Among the prevailing ideas is one that Waldman has dubbed “replanting”: buying out and replacing the financially driven owners of the daily press, through something like a “deconsolidation fund.” A couple of billion could do that, and that’s not completely impossible money to ponder. The perhaps bigger question: Where does the money come from to operate a resurgent local news operation — and hopefully to make it grow?

That platform “retransmission” money could be part of a big new idea. By itself, platform money would be meaningful. But combine it with some of the newer proposals now being advanced and an updated financial business model may be possible for the local press of the 2020s.

Part of that is government, government-funneled, or government-incentivized funding. Most immediately, there’s the federal COVID-related bailout money. Some mostly smaller newspapers have been able to take advantage of that short-term loan-turned-to-grant aid; bigger ones are too big or too debt-encumbered to make use of them. Gannett’s Mike Reed has told employees the company benefits from federal programs that allow the postponing of both FICA and pension plan payments; he’s estimated as much as $150 million in delayable bills, according to Gannett sources.

There’s a push to expand coronavirus-related government ad programs, directed toward local newspapers. There are also several proposals to use the tax system to incentivize publishers, investors, and/or consumers to provide more money to pay journalists.

The big national responses, led by the News Media Alliance, could break something loose. It’s asking Congress to give it an anti-trust exemption so its members can negotiate as one with the platforms, as well as pushing forward on multiple industry aid programs.

And in some communities facing financialized ownership, journalists and their supporters aim to separate out once-robust titles from the hedge fund herd. They look to cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, L.A., Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston for inspiration, hoping to find civic-minded wealthy people to revive a paper. The Save Our Sun movement is trying in Baltimore; it joins other recent efforts in Chicago and Sacramento. All of these efforts have now been made more complicated, at least in the short-term, by COVID-driven uncertainty.

Depending on how you look at it, this virus has changed everything — radically changed what 2020 will look like for local news — or simply accelerated the industry down the path it was pointed toward before all this. Wealthy saviors, platform complaints, nonprofit dreams, hedge fund nightmares — those themes have all been with us for quite some time.

If that sounds like a mashup of “Rounders,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The DaVinci Code,” and “National Treasure: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Heist,” you’re not too far off. But that’s the log line for a series The Boston Globe began running Sunday: a serialized novella called “The Mechanic.”

The author is Ben Mezrich, best known for his nonfiction books on gambling and for having written the book that became the basis for “The Social Network.” (When I looked at his Twitter account this morning, the “Who to Follow” recommendations included both Winklevii.) He is also, importantly for these purposes, a Bostonian.

The Globe has published the first four chapters as of this morning; the remaining 18 will spool out over the next two weeks. It’s getting front-page treatment; it’s a great opportunity for any corrupt Boston pol to say, correctly, “That story on the front page of the Globe? Never happened.”

Serialized fiction has a long and storied history on newsprint. It was common in the 19th and early 20th century; more recently, it’s been a tool someone remembers to use every few years to get people hooked into a daily habit — an increasingly important factor after the shift from daily print to whenever digital.

In 1999, a 29-part novel by Roy Peter Clark ran in what were then The New York Times’ regional papers. (“The adventures of a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based investigative reporter on the trail of a doomsday cult with cataclysmic plans for the turn of the century.”) In 2007, The Washington Post ran a reporter-penned thriller called “Jezebel’s Tomb.” (“It features a journalist who investigates a bombing and tries to track down a mysterious 2,000-year-old document that may hold a dangerous secret.”) The Guardian serialized a Chris Ware graphic novella in 2014. The New York Times regularly ran serial fiction in the late 2000s, including works by Michael Chabon, Patricia Cornwell, and John Banville.

But those appeared in somewhat more normal times; the thinking here is that, when the world’s on fire, people could use a taut narrative to get lost in. As the paper put it: “The Globe’s commitment to covering the coronavirus pandemic continues unabated, as today’s paper and website make plain, but we thought a bit of a diversion might also be welcome.”

Enjoyed the first two installments of The Mechanic,’ by Ben Mezrich https://t.co/Ke3YOx5MGJ Thanks @BostonGlobe ! It’s great to read something other than CV19.

— johnnycrossfit (@johnnycrossfit) May 4, 2020

I’m a little obsessed with @benmezrich’s writing, so it’s pretty cool to have him partnering with the Globe for his latest project. https://t.co/aw0rYPauWn pic.twitter.com/hR1THxIluD

— Dan McGowan (@DanMcGowan) May 3, 2020

Today the Boston Globe, in an effort to offer "a bit of a diversion" for readers consumed by Trump's hourly fumbling, constant lying, and utter incompetence, begins a serialized fictional mystery by Ben Mezrich: "The Mechanic." https://t.co/C9cdJHiTEZ

— Harland Gundlefinger (@Gundlefinger16) May 3, 2020

The serialized new novel, The Mechanic, by @benmezrich will be published in the @BostonGlobe, chapter by chapter starting this Sunday for two weeks. Read along with this fun Boston mystery – stolen art, card sharks, ex-cons, and more. #themechanic https://t.co/ZCHGM7YLSv

— Linda Pizzuti Henry (@Linda_Pizzuti) May 2, 2020

Bloomberg the company was, at that point, a highly successful data and information business for traders, but Bloomberg the man was interested in getting into journalism, a field in which he had no particular experience. Winkler was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal when he got the call: “Hi, it’s Bloomberg. I need some advice. What would it take to get into the news business?” Winkler had a question of his own:

Mike Bloomberg surprised me when I parried his initial query about what it would take to get into the news business with another question: “All right,” I said. “You have just published a story that says the chairman — and I mean chairman — of your biggest customer has taken $5 million from the corporate till.

He is with his secretary at a Rio de Janeiro resort, and the secretary’s spurned boyfriend calls to tip you off. You get an independent verification that the story is true. Then the phone rings. The customer’s public-relations person says, ‘Kill the story or we will return all the terminals we currently rent from you.'”

“What would you do?” I asked.

“Go with the story,” Mike said. “Our lawyers will love the fees you generate.”

That was the deciding moment.

Fast-forward to today: An NPR investigation details what Winkler and Bloomberg did when that theoretical scenario edged into reality. They didn’t go with the story — they killed it.

Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved…

In 2012, [Beijing correspondent Mike] Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China’s ruling classes.

The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and his wife, author and journalist Leta Hong] Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer.

Even so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders’ ties to the country’s richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters’ sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping. The story gained steam throughout 2013.

In emails sent back to Bloomberg’s journalists in China seen by Fincher, senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement.

And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran.

The demise of that investigation — which Winkler publicly claimed “was not ready for publication” — has been a matter of dispute in the years since.

The fear of angering a rising China with tough reporting or criticism has become a theme of the last decade of high-end American journalism. In 2012, The New York Times had its news — including its new Chinese-language website — blocked in China for reporting on the wealth accumulated by the family of prime minister Wen Jiabao.

More recently, China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters in February over an unflattering headline on a Journal op-ed. After a Trump administration response, the country announced last month it would expel additional reporters from the Times, the Journal, and The Washington Post. Like technology companies, news organizations have to negotiate the ethical questions that come with engaging with a country at profound odds with democratic ideals.

In most of the publicly known cases — and “publicly known” is an important clause there — news companies do not appear to have acted in direct violation of their values. But Folkenflik’s reporting makes it clear the Bloomberg Way did not guide the actions of Bloomberg’s editors on this China story:

Finally, in late October 2013, Bloomberg’s famously intense founding editor-in-chief, Matthew Winkler, weighed in, via a private conference call. In attendance: senior news executives in New York and the China-based investigative team. NPR has obtained audio of Winkler’s remarks on the call.

“It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country,” Winkler said. “So, I just don’t see that as a story that is justified.”

He expressed great apprehension because of the potential consequences of publishing another investigation. In this case, it was one that would itemize the links between top Chinese Communist Party leaders and the country’s wealthiest man.

Winkler returned to those fears repeatedly. “The inference is going to be interpreted by the government there as we are judging them,” Winkler said. “And they will probably kick us out of the country. They’ll probably shut us down, is my guess”…

“There’s a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we’ve tried to build there,” he told the reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story.

The approach extended to Michael Bloomberg, the recent presidential candidate, himself:

“If a country gives you the license to do something with certain restrictions, you have two choices,” Bloomberg told his staff [at a company town hall meeting]. “You either accept the license and do it that way, or you don’t do business there.”

Bloomberg also referred to unnamed “bad apples” in the newsroom.

At a time when most news outlets have been weakened, both financially and as civic institutions, we rely increasingly on the remaining news giants — the big companies that can afford to take a financial hit or pay its lawyers to fight the good fight — to stand up for the right things. A privately held company owned by a man worth $60 billion — more than Wang Jianlin! — is the definition of a company that can afford to take a hit. It appears Bloomberg News and its management fell short here.

A few other excerpts from The Bloomberg Way, for anyone who needs them:

Follow the money. Explaining the role of money in all its forms — from capital flows to executive compensation to the cost of an acquisition to election spending — reveals the meaning of news.

[…]

We avoid conflicts of interest — actual, potential or perceived — political, financial or personal.

[…]

We are often in the difficult position of covering the customers of Bloomberg LP. We do not allow commercial considerations to shade our news judgment because that would undermine our integrity and reputation.

[…]

Bloomberg News does not allow external parties or the commercial interests of Bloomberg LP to dictate our reporting. Altering a story because it may embarrass a company or individual would create the perception that we yield to outside pressure, and that would cost us our integrity.

[…]

Our mission at Bloomberg News requires us to be…

Honest enough to admit our mistakes as soon as we discover them and
diligent enough to correct them.

Thoughtful enough to understand that the sum of us is greater than
our parts.

Humble enough to know we can always do better.

“We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week.

At least. Ask an American newspaper exec a few weeks ago what they thought 2025 would look like, and they’d tell it you it would be much more digital, far less print, and more dependent on reader revenue than advertising. Some of them would have told you they think they had a plan to get there. Others, if they were being candid, would have said they didn’t see the route yet, but they hoped to find one in time.

The COVID-19 crisis has clearly accelerated that timeline — and may have ripped it to shreds altogether, depending on how long the shutdown lasts and how deep the resulting recession gets.

Make no mistake, though: Many of the decisions being made right now and in the next few weeks will be permanent ones. No newspaper that drops print days of publication will ever add them back. Humpty Dumpty won’t put the 20th-century newspaper back together again. There can be no return to status quo ante; the ante was already vanishing.

Will these decisions “save” the local press, as we’re bombarded with stories of systemic, perhaps irreversible failure in North America, the U.K., and Europe? One way or the other, these are now existential decisions that can no longer be avoided or postponed.

Right now, publishers are combing through Friday’s federal bailout legislation, “trying to determine if they qualify, for how much and when the money might be available,” David Chavern, CEO of the News Media Alliance, told me Monday. “That is going to take at least a several more days (if not a bit longer) — and I assume that some of these publishers are holding off personnel actions until they know the answers.”

Gannett, now by far the largest local news chain, has already announced pay cuts and furloughs, in both the U.S. and U.K. But all publishers, big and small, are now considering their options. Those include layoffs, rapidly eliminating several days of print publishing, reducing their ad sales staff, and questioning their need for large central offices as remote work becomes a workable norm.

All of those ideas have been discussed for years. But now they have to make decisions they’d hoped could wait a few more. The decisions they make, and how they can act on them, will tell us a lot about how much of the local press is left — and how much isn’t — come 2021.

That’s an internal view. Of course, local newspapers operate in a broader media world — including local public media, local TV, and local startups. In some larger cities, public radio stations are taking audience (and sometimes talent) from the dailies. Local commercial TV stations are feeling advertising pain too, but they still have more capacity to sustain themselves — and grab future market share. “They’re expanding more in digital and in social,” says TV business expert Bob Papper, who tracks the industry closely. That’s true even after Michael Bloomberg’s one-man subsidy of local TV ran its course.

Then there’s the nascent independent local press, from VTDigger to Berkeleyside, Charlotte Agenda to The Colorado Sun, The Memphian to MinnPost. Many of these green shoots are finding a little more sunlight — but they’ll be the first to tell you that it’s a tough road replacing their town’s flagging ancestral dailies. Meanwhile, amidst the carnage, some schemers and dreamers are strategizing about what they see as the detritus of a daily industry, waiting to be bought out or taken off by a new generation of local news builders. They’re early in that process; that’s a story for another day.

Let’s step back for a moment and consider the larger society in which local news — and all of us — now all operate. The double whammy of virus terror and economic calamity has made real a whole host of underlying issues — from generational equity to the ragged safety net, affordable child care to cramped housing, the entire panoply of inequities baked into our society.

Perhaps this will be merely a short bout of home detention followed by a fast, v-shaped economic recovery. Maybe these issues will dissolve quickly in the public discourse. For tens of millions, though, they will remain ever-present, defining their lives and their possibilities.

How will the local press of the 2020s cover these realities of life on the ground when we return, blinking, into the sunlight? Will journalism at all levels be strong enough to contribute the deep reporting and analysis that that intelligent fixes require? Will a society shocked by American incompetence in the face of an enemy find its future aided by the press it deserves and requires? Or will a nation of emptied-out newsrooms be unable to meet the moment?

As I wrote Friday, the biggest problem in America isn’t (yet, at least) newspapers going under. It’s ghost papers, strip-mined by ownership, disguised as news sources but actually offering very little in the way of local news or community leadership. The press, whatever its form, finds itself in a classic position: Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

In the shorter term, though, the set of life-or-death questions local newspaper companies face right now is fairly clear.

• Will we keep seven days of print publishing?
• What does it mean to run a mainly reader revenue-driven business?
• How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?
• How many journalists will our new business reality allow us to pay?
• Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?
• What do “advertising” and “events” look like?
• Should we merge or sell?

So let’s look at each of these more deeply to see what a prematurely arriving 2025 means to readers, journalists, newspaper employees, and publishers.

Nearly every publisher has looked at this question — and nervously stepped back, ever since Advance Local stepped out way ahead of the crowd in 2012. Their compelling fear: Would ending seven-day print be a final breaking point for the habits for decades-long subscribers — the ones now paying $400 to $1,000 a year for home delivery? How many of these customers wouldn’t even transition to a lower price point for some print and more digital? How many would, like so many newspaper subscribers before them, just go away?

McClatchy provided one of the best and most watched dress rehearsals in the trade last year. Last summer, I wrote about how the company began its program of dropping print Saturdays for a single weekend edition — something the Europeans did successfully ages ago. Now McClatchy’s little experiment has become the standard across the entire 30-title chain. And its results are clear.

“The retention from digital Saturdays has been nearly total,” Sara Glines, regional publisher for McClatchy’s Carolina properties, told me Monday:

We lost less than a dozen subscribers in each market, in some markets less than a handful. Digital activation went up immediately. E-edition usage went up on Saturdays. In today’s coronavirus environment, those digital activations have gone a long way in bringing more readers to our digital platforms for breaking news and updates. Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald were our last markets to launch digital Saturdays. Their first digital Saturday was March 21. It went just as smoothly as all other markets.

How well does McClatchy’s Saturday strategy translate to the broader industry? We know the lessons:

• Communication: Talk to readers early and often about why day-cutting is happening.
• Move relevant features and news into other products, digital or print, that make sense to readers. Reconfigure the Sunday paper into more of a week-in-review, stronger-in-features product.
• Set new pricing that customers think is fair.

But those essential-to-execute guidelines only tell us so much. Dropping Saturdays saves publishers some money — but not that much. With as much as half of their ad money evaporated by COVID-19, publishers will need bigger savings — which means cutting more days.

Readers who might easily adjust to the logic of a weekend paper might also think that saying goodbye to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, all at the same time, is too much. If it’s too much for readers, and they drop their subscriptions entirely, then the local news business spirals downward even more quickly.

If it works, though, it can save a lot of money.

A huge portion of newspapers’ budgets remains tied up in manufacturing: presses, paper, ink, trucks, and all the people who handle them. (These are the often forgotten newspaper employees, the ones who realize their jobs are going away, but nonetheless like the idea of that happening in 2025 more than 2020. Let’s not forget them.)

“There are so many variables,” one veteran of the trade told me:

Most important: Do you outsource printing or not? If you do, then you can usually cut days and save money. If you own your own presses, it’s harder to manage. Pressmen don’t work just two days. What does it do to your distribution network; can they afford to operate just two days a week? Do you have an agreement to print and distribute other papers like The New York Times or USA Today?

That reckoning — to in-source or outsource — has led to much more regionalized printing, like The Columbus Dispatch being printed 175 miles away in Indianapolis. Those longer distances lead to much earlier editorial deadlines, which means missing late news or sports — often resulting in a print product that’s 36 hours behind the news we read on our smartphones. That’s part of this unending spindown of the newspaper industry.

What’s the 2025 business view here? Expect that most surviving dailies will offer as robust a Sunday print product as they can, and digital through the day, through the week. Or maybe it’s Sunday and Wednesday, for midweek print advertising, depending on individual markets. Or maybe the big Sunday paper shifts back to Friday or Saturday to capture more weekend reading and shopping. Done well, a publisher that shifts from seven days to a couple can expect to retain 75 to 90 percent of existing print advertising. But publishers have been properly wary of that ripcord now dangling in their corner office.

We’ve already seen several titles, most prominently the Tampa Bay Times, announced radical day cuts, within this crisis, and we’ll see more. The question is how many more, and how many days will they be cutting? Even in relatively prosperous California, major publishers are planning to drop Saturday print by early next year, knowledgeable sources tell me.

What does it mean to run a mainly reader-revenue-driven business?

The national news brands offer the best-practice playbooks here.

Business intelligence forms the foundation of their business, with an ever-evolving understanding of how to win — and keep — paying subscribers. That intel has then led to newsroom staffing expansion. They’re creating a virtual flywheel of more and better content and services to readers, who then pay for subscriptions and build a new — bigger — business.

For the locally oriented companies, though, that model is daunting. Do they have the will, capital, time, and talent to apply proven lessons?

How do we find the right people with the right skills to run a digital business?

Going digital (doesn’t that sound odd in 2020?) means committing to a business run by people with digital skills, and not enough publishers have truly done that. Time’s now up. As I noted in my start-of-the-decade Epiphanies piece: “The brain drain is real. What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers? Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.” That truism makes the accelerated movement to “digital” even tougher.

How many journalists will our new business reality enable us to pay?

Some smaller chain newspapers were already down to the most skeleton of product-producing staffs, pre-COVID-19. We’ll now see tested the question of how low on staffing they can go — just to get a product out. The more important question, though, is: How many people do they need to produce something readers will pay for?

Will we still expect journalists to report to a central office every day?

Having learned that they can produce the news almost entirely remotely (other than printing and distribution), how much will news organizations want to reconfigure their workspaces to generate savings out of reduced office space?

“We’re 100 percent remote,” says Mike Klingensmith, publisher of the Star Tribune. “Nobody is in our office. I don’t know how we are doing it. Everyone may figure out we don’t need an office after all.”

About 20 percent of newspaper employees work in the physical business of print, manufacturing, and distribution. For the rest, this small unthinkable is now thinkable.

What do “advertising” and “events” look like?

Publishers have continued to make and re-make their ad priorities, staffing, and skills as The Duopoly and digital have forever changed the nature of advertising. This crisis — with some portion of that missing advertising likely never to return — will prompt more rethinking. How much inside sales versus how much outside? How much branded? How much direct versus programmatic?

The events business is also a big question mark, as Josh Benton explored last week. O’Reilly Media deciding to end its big event business was shocking. I agree with the sentiments of Rafat Ali, founder of travel B2B leader Skift: “If we ever give in to the idea that face-to-face events will be over, then we should also give up on the idea that people will travel again. We might as well give up on, well, everything.” Rafat-like, and as ever, to the point.

He expresses a global POV; let me add a local one. The future of the local press is in a deep and authentic relationship with its readers and communities. And that means people in close contact, post-coronavirus. Events of all kinds will be a major part of that future for the successful.

Will we have to merge or sell to stay in business?

The Olympics may have been pushed to 2021, but The Consolidation Games is going ahead as scheduled, virus schmirus. In fact, there’s good reason to believe this crisis is accelerating an M&A process that had already been moving fast.

Share prices for publicly traded chains have dropped dramatically, with Gannett floating just below $2 Monday. When GateHouse bought Gannett — just over four months ago! — this was the deal: “$12.06 a share in cash and stock, based on New Media’s Friday closing price, with a promise of $6.25 in cash and 0.5427 of a New Media share for each Gannett share.” From that to two bucks is quite a fall.

Depending on the duration of this crisis, Gannett’s shares are likely to rise eventually. But its big question remains the $1.8 billion in debt — at 11.5 percent interest — that it took on to make the merger work. Will Gannett be able to keep on schedule with those payments — while, you know, actually operating the company — if the ad exodus extends into summer or fall?

It’s not just future earnings that these companies need to worry about it. It’s also collecting on what’s already been sold, on ads that have already run.

“One of biggest issues is cash flow,” one news industry financial veteran told me. “What if all those SMBs [small to midsize businesses] don’t pay for January and February ads? Even if they have cash, they don’t want to cut checks. Even places like Macy’s may just not pay for January inserts.”

(Here we meet one of the great players in any crisis: attorneys. “In this whole mess, expect full employment of lawyers arguing ‘force majeure’ as a reason not to enforce contracts businesses want to get out of,'” that finance source continued. Is a pandemic an Act of God? It’s a legal “gray area.”)

These are more than abstract concerns. Metro publishers have already told me about major advertisers asking for givebacks and “accommodations.”

Some, including me and much wealthier investor Leon Cooperman, have long doubted Gannett’s ability to pay off that five-year loan while continuing to pay a hefty dividend to shareholders and keep enough people in its newsrooms with the cash flow it could expect.

This crisis only makes those doubts grow stronger.

It’s way too early to mention the “D” word — default — though it is being brought up offline.

Now consider the other drama that’s been submerged in the virus crisis. What will become of Alden Global Capital’s essential takeover of Tribune Publishing? It’s likely more “logical” — in terms of profit maximization — than it was before. Sources tell me a merger between Tribune and Alden’s MNG Enterprises is likely to be announced before the June 30 that is so pivotal in Tribune’s future.

One financial source tells me the deal will be a mix of cash and stock: “Tribune is the acquirer. That would leave them with more liquid security, a big beneficiary of all the synergies. Tribune can fit it into their balance sheet, since it has little debt, with no problem.” (At the moment, Tribune debt stands at $37.6 million.)

Tribune has already begun to look more like Alden’s MNG, notorious as the industry’s most aggressive newsroom shrinker. Tribune has been cutting costs, reducing management positions, and searching for efficiencies wherever it can find them. This current crisis only adds impetus to that work.

In that scenario, Tribune properties — in major cities like Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Orlando — will probably begin to look more like MNG papers The Mercury News and The Denver Post. Newsrooms cut to be the bone. Disinvestment from what Alden has always seen as a largely mythical digital future.

Financially, it’s a strategy that has worked for Alden. Enough older subscribers have accepted its higher pricing, and it’s found just enough buyers of its minimal digital products to keep the profits coming.

While its numbers aren’t as good as what I reported two years ago, its top properties still throw off (or did pre-coronavirus) margins of more than 20 percent. That’s unheard of among nearly all other publishers.

So what will this crisis mean to Alden and its president and chief dealmaker, Heath Freeman? “Heath could use this to run the table,” one observer said.

It’s easy to see why and how that indeed might be possible. Look at what the chain landscape may be by summer. McClatchy, one of the now lonely “independent” chains, will emerge from bankruptcy in four to six months (unless virus-driven delays lengthen the process). At that point, controlling owner Chatham Asset Management will look at its options.

One will be merging with the new Alden+Tribune.

Another, maybe, would be turning to Gannett. That would require a larger financially rejiggering, though, with lender Apollo a key player.

Either way, given the deep declines the industry faced pre-COVID, plus the unknown toll going forward, we could well see this reality: four hedge funds and private equity firms controlling a majority of America’s daily press as 2020 rolls on into darkness.

Chatham, Apollo, Alden, and Fortress Investment Group (which holds a contract to manage Gannett through 2021) may well get to decide amongst themselves how to divvy up the properties that deliver the local news most Americans get.

That’s not the picture Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen has in mind as he has launched his “Save The Free Press Initiative” in December. But it’s a reality we may all soon face.

This extreme moment is forcing publishers’ hands. Undoubtedly, some may look back on the other side of COVID-19 and say: “That worked well. We should have done it earlier.” Others will wish they’d had more time to think about jumping.

If publishers’ can still see any water in the glass at all — it seems to be emptying day by day — they might invoke Rahm Emanuel’s timely advice about the Great Recession at the start of Barack Obama’s presidency: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

This is a crisis. This is serious. And there’s no time left to waste.

What’s black and white and now deemed “essential”?

Newspapers, of course — the communications medium that, along with its media peers, has been formally recognized as a public good by cities and states trying to determine which slices of their economies not to shut down. Factual local reporting is indeed an “essential” in an age of fear and misinformation.

That’s the sliver of silver lining in this time of unprecedented financial stress. Our work, as journalists and as institutions, is being consumed and appreciated.

“We’ve gotten all these great letters that ‘Our respect and admiration for your work has never been higher,” says Star Tribune publisher Mike Klingensmith, whose Minneapolis daily has seen big spikes in readership as well.

“Your reporting during the COVID-19 crisis has been top-drawer and inspired me, finally, to execute the much overdue annual subscription ‘donation’,” one new member wrote Colorado Sun editor Larry Ryckman this week. “Please keep up the good work and know that your reporting is incredibly valuable, not merely during this crisis.”

Colorado Public Radio also feels the love, including this heartfelt tweet:

So true. My auto-donation to @CPRNews came out of bank today & I admit I was tempted to cancel it before next month (husband lost job and our health insurance this week) but after 2-seconds I realized they’re some of my best friends right now and I’m happy to pay that bill https://t.co/AvnVUtghtQ

— KB (@kb80202) March 19, 2020

“Audience feedback and digital use has been tremendous, and the numbers are stunning,” sums up Colorado Public Radio head Stewart Vanderwilt.

A giant story like coronavirus is often when journalists feel most connected to the sense of mission that got them into this line of work. It’s the love — plus a much-appreciated viral bump in audience, subscriptions, and memberships — that is buoying otherwise overwhelmed publishers and newsrooms.

More bittersweet is how one innovative local news exec put it to me: “This may be our last chance to prove how valuable we are.”

CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the AP, and more are providing the national reporting. They show us, through words and graphics and images, the scale of the tragedy and the many flaws in the federal government’s response to the crisis. But they can’t answer the fundamentally local questions urgent on minds nationwide.

How many people are sick near me? How well equipped is my hospital? Where can and can’t I go? What’s my mayor or my governor doing to help? Who can deliver what? Where can I get tested? And a hundred other perhaps life-or-death decisions as half of Americans nervously face indefinite home detention.

Many of the country’s 20,000-plus journalists have risen to the occasion, working the phones, filing remotely, and venturing out into the invisible threat to get the stories that require the sight or even touch of other humans. All while wondering: How long will I have my job?

That’s the terrible irony of this moment. The amount of time Americans spend with journalists’ work and their willingness to pay for it have both spiked, higher than at any point since Election 2016, maybe before. But the business that has supported these journalists — shakily, on wobbly wheels — now finds the near future almost impossible to navigate.

The question of the hour: How many journalists will still have jobs once the initial virus panic subsides? How much factually reported news — especially local news — will Americans be able to get in the aftermath of this siege?

The answer lies in great part on the people in those quotes above: It is readers and their willingness to support the news who increasingly distinguish the survivors from those facing the end of the road. Advertising, which has been doing a slow disappearing act since 2008, has been cut in half in the space of two weeks. It’s unlikely to come back quickly — the parts that do come back at all.

The problem is the same it’s been for years: The increases in reader revenue are outmatched by the declines in advertising. So this very welcome swell of support from audiences is being swamped by the much larger evaporation of ad revenue. News publishers nationwide are afflicted with existential gut checks — aches that get a little worse with each day’s new dot on the chart of coronavirus cases.

Let’s look first at the cliff-edge effects — which are dramatic — and then plumb the good news of reader engagement and subscription. In an upcoming piece, peering ahead five years or so, I’ll take a look at the big takeaways and likely longer-term impacts of this sudden twist of fate.

A profound advertising crisis

This event isn’t just a black swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s parlance for an unexpected happening that forever alters the course of history. For dailies — in the U.S., in Canada, in the U.K., and really globally — it’s a flock of black swans.

Why? The daily newspaper industry has been on a respirator of its own for more than a decade. Ever since the Great Recession sucked 17 percent of advertising oxygen out of the system in 2008 — then another 27 percent in 2009 — it’s been climbing uphill, its gasps growing more frantic as financial operators consolidate and stripmine what was once a profoundly local industry. All together, American newspapers have lost more than 70 percent of their ad dollars since 2006.

The industry enters this turning-point event with about $1 billion remaining in total annual profits. That’s a fraction of what it was at its height, but it’s still a lot of money — which is why the financial consolidation I’ve chronicled over the last year has continued.

If the massive ad losses we’re now beginning to see remain in place for months, all of that profitability will be gone, and then some. We’ll enter a new stage of loss: The news deserts will become the norm, the oases the rarity.

How bad is it out there? The overall ad business — call it advertising, sponsorship, underwriting — is in depression.

I’ve spoken with more than a dozen well-placed executives in the industry, and the consensus is that, in April, daily publishers will lose between 30 and 50 percent of their total ad revenue. Things are unlikely to improve until we’re past mass sequestration, whenever that is.

“We’re hitting the end of March,” one highly experienced ad exec told me. “We see what’s coming. Big, big misses [of revenue expectations].”

The numbers are necessarily imprecise, and they change daily. March, ironically enough, started surprisingly strong for some publishers. Several noted stable businesses, even a little growth here and there.

Then the virus. April will start off with many fewer bookings and many more cancellations. The second quarter is one big question mark, but publishers also know what a 50 percent drop isn’t even the worst-case scenario. Retailers are closed. Car dealers aren’t selling. Few people are hiring, and who’s brave enough to venture into a new house or apartment to look around?

Then there’s preprints. These Sunday circulars and inserts have remained a robust, high-margin product for many publishers. But many of the big-box stores that paid for them are now closed, including major (if perennially dwindling) retailer Macy’s. Those that remain open, the Targets and Walgreens and grocery stores, wonder what they can advertise; supply chains for both essentials and non-essentials remains uncertain, and people aren’t doing a lot of spontaneous shopping sparked by a deal in an ad.

Is anything holding up okay? The legal ads that newspaper carry of official government actions. Obituaries (darkly enough). And, where they’re legal (and have been allowed to remain open), marijuana dispensaries. (They deliver!)

But the uncertainty is near-universal. “Even those who have something to sell are really concerned about doing it,” one revenue exec told me. “They’re unclear on how to get their message right and not seeming to profiteer.”

Seattle Times president Alan Fisco provides detail:

We have seen deep losses, not surprisingly, in travel, entertainment, restaurant, auto advertising (particularly in our smaller markets, Yakima and Walla Walla).

Our projections show April to be significantly worse than the hit we are taking in March. The annual print declines look to be double what we were experiencing prior to this.

And in spite of significant traffic increases, while we are seeing an increase in programmatic [advertising], it isn’t enough to offset our O&O [self-sold advertising] losses and some of our audience extension product losses (search and social).

(The Seattle Times’ remarkable coverage of the country’s first hotspot was highlighted here.)

Most local dailies have entered this crisis still more dependent on ad revenue than on reader revenue, even though the percentages have moved closer to parity after three years of double-digit print ad decline. They have envied The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for having achieved business models based primarily on reader revenue.

(Ironically, coronavirus will likely push a lot of local publishers into that elite club — but through cratered ad revenue, not soaring reader revenue.)

The devastation across news media is universal but, inevitably, uneven. All local sources of news — daily newspapers, local digital, public radio stations, local TV stations — are reporting deepening losses.

It’s those most reliant on advertising that are most at risk. As reported earlier here at the Lab, it’s alternative weeklies and other free papers that look to be in the first trench. Significantly, the alt-weekly trade entered this year weaker than it’s ever been; no more than a dozen of them nationwide could be called significantly profitable, sources tell me.

“Eighty percent of our advertisers are restaurants, clubs, performance venues and all that is gone for at least two months,” one alt-weekly publisher told me Thursday, underlining how alt-weeklies’ strength — their connection to a vibrant city life — has turned against them.

Among independent digital sites, many of them members of LION Publishers and/or INN, sponsorship/advertising has indeed taken a hit. But since few depend overwhelmingly on it, the effects are worrisome more than catastrophic.

“Ironically, the nonprofits we’re hearing from with struggles right now are those that have done a lot to diversify their revenue streams,” says Sue Cross, executive director of INN, the Institute for Nonprofit News. These are news organizations that were doing a lot of events — now cancelled and with a less-certain future. Or they had big in-person spring fundraisers now forced to pivot to virtual, but that doesn’t replace substantial sponsorship revenue.

Five years ago, Ted Williams founded Charlotte Agenda, one of the liveliest and most commercially savvy sites on the emerging landscape. CA is taking some fire, but has so far it’s been manageable:

Revenues are down around 25 percent. This decrease consists of the drop-in job postings, event listings, and short-term ad deals. We’re fortunate that over 65 percent of our revenue comes from 12-month sponsorship deals across 28 big brands, most of which are negotiated in late fall.

Public radio, too, which depends more greatly on membership revenue than on advertising (or underwriting, as they call it), is also taking a hit.

“On the revenue side, we could see a negative swing of as much as $2 million in the final quarter, ending June 30,” says Vanderwilt of Colorado Public Radio, which has seen a remarkable surge of online readership and radio listenership. “Thirty to forty percent of our sponsorship is from the categories most immediately impacted by the need for social distancing and actual shutdowns. Arts, entertainment, events, restaurants, clubs — and education. Just about all have cancelled/paused their schedules.”

“We have seen some upticks in unsolicited donations coming in,” says Tim Olson, senior vice president of strategic relationships at KQED, the nation’s biggest regional station. But it too has suffered some sponsor loss and is, for now at least, forgoing another tried-and-true revenue source:

Public media stations, particularly news and information public radio stations, have almost all cancelled their on-air pledge drives in order to continue uninterrupted coverage of COVID-19. On air drives are critical drivers of new donors, and reminder to current donors, so the loss of on-air drives is likely to have an effect.

Local TV stations are also assessing what the spring will look like. Several are forecasting a 20 to 30 percent loss at this point in advertising. While they don’t have reader revenue, their ample retransmission fee contracts provide a big steady source of income.

Even with record consumption of digital news, advertising there is fetching far less than you might think. The reasons are straightforward: Many advertisers specify that they don’t want their products to appear next to a virus-related story — and that’s where most of the traffic is, of course. And with all businesses on temporary hold, demand for advertising is down.

That has led programmatic pricing, several publishers say, to be down about 30 percent. One told me it’s now dropping closer to 50 percent as society closes more doors.

In any event, all legacy local media — newspapers, TV, and public radio — are still much more reliant on their core legacy revenue than on digital dollars. So even increases in digital revenue don’t do much to counter the current big declines elsewhere.

The public’s hunger for local news is proven

That’s a lot of bleakness in advertising. But amid it all, there’s a little sunshine in digital subscriptions — the closest thing to a path forward for local newspapers.

Mike Orren, chief product officer at The Dallas Morning News, ticks off these amazing numbers: “Pageviews are up 90 percent. Users are up 70 percent. New users are up 75 percent. Sessions are up 96 percent. Sessions per user are up 14 percent. Session duration is up 9 percent.” And all that has pumped up digital subs.

Digital subscriptions are way up at the strongest local newspapers, with new weekly signups up 2× to 5× over pre-virus times. That’s thousands of much-needed new customers.

(How well are the two general-news pay leaders, The New York Times and The Washington Post, doing? They won’t say. We’ll find out the Times’ experience at its next earnings report.)

That kind of digital subscription growth is widely reported among medium-to-large local papers that do two things well: (1) fund a newsroom able to cover the local crisis in knowledgable depth; (2) have a system in place that facilitates quick and easy subscription signups.

Many newspapers fail to meet both those criteria, and they’ve seen a flatter growth ramp.

Notably, several publishers say that lots of people aren’t waiting to hit a paywall and run out of free articles for the month — they’re hitting those Subscribe buttons earlier and unprompted. They’re acting on both the value of the journalism and the community service.

One other indication of increased loyalty: fewer subscription cancellations. Churn is down. “We’re adding 50 to 70 subscribers every single day and seeing very little churn,” Tampa Bay Times editor Mark Katches told the Local News Initiative. “Churn is as common as the sunrise, but we’re experiencing the lowest churn rate this month that we’ve seen since we introduced the pay meter about a year ago. We attribute that to high interest in our coverage.”

The New York Times requires a new user’s registration in order to have free access to its coronavirus coverage. But most publishers have just opened their coverage up without any friction.

The Dallas Morning News’ strategy is somewhere nuanced and in between. It requires readers to sign up for a virus newsletter in order to get to unlimited related coverage, but it doesn’t require any more information than an email address. “It’s less friction,” Orren says. The idea has paid dividends: That newsletter now has an astounding 334,000 subscribers.

Some of more ambitious local news startups also report impressive numbers. The 18-month-old Colorado Sun is seeing a spurt.

“We have had nearly 600 new members sign up so far this month,” editor Ryckman told me Wednesday. “We signed up 330 new members in February, so we’re easily on track to double that pace by the end of the month.” The site overall has more than 8,000 paying members, with about 1,400 of those at the premium level. “Our traffic has been regularly 3× a normal day — and has been has high as 10×,” he said.

The Daily Memphian, also about 18 months old, is seeing a response both to its coverage and to appeals from its editor Eric Barnes: “Sub starts have jumped 250 percent in the last 2 weeks. And that’s even though we’ve made all our COVID stories free (and that’s 80 percent or more of what we’re doing).”

Barnes underlines the need to remind readers of the costs of journalism. “But we’ve been very intentional with calls to action in stories and newsletters, along the lines of “Our articles are free — but covering the news is not. Please subscribe.” (Memphian sports columnist Geoff Calkins wrote his own direct appeal to readers, aiming to reach a different kind of reader-relationship connection.)

LION Publishers executive director Chris Krewson reports good uptake among his more aggressive member local news orgs. “Berkeleyside has signed up 267 new members since starting a campaign around the virus a few weeks ago, and also gotten donations from existing members, for a total of $50,000 in new-member revenue. The Berkshire Eagle launched a membership campaign and already has 300 members.”

“Many members are reporting huge increases in traffic — five, even ten times their normal pageviews, and also increases in community support and donations,” says INN’s Cross. “Even very small sites are hosting Facebook groups and seeing thousands join overnight, organizing collaboratives of all media in their towns.”

Pulitzer-winning Portland alt-weekly Willamette Week launched a voluntary membership program back in September. As of week ago, it had signed up 510 members. Seven days later and more than 1,100 new members have signed up. “In addition to the much-needed cash, those [and their comments] are tonic for the soul,” publisher and editor Mark Zusman told me Thursday.

For public radio, this crisis has been more about affirming its valued place in listeners’ and readers’ lives — in greater engagement — than in signing up new members. Over the past five years, most of the top 20 public radio stations have morphed more fully into “public media,” investing heavily in digital local news. Those that did are also reaping the returns.

“As of yesterday, CPR.org had over 2 million uniques and [on its separate site] Denverite 500,000,” says CPR’s Vanderwilt. That’s double and quadruple normal traffic, respectively. “The daily Lookout newsletter subs have grown 36 percent since March 1. We have also started publishing twice a day plus news alerts. Open rate has climbed from 32 percent to 41 percent.”

The public, for now, is eating up the added frequency and opening more of those newsletters. At KQED, pageviews have doubled and time spent on pages is up by a quarter. Overall, the public’s hunger for local news at this time is proven.

At metros, daily visits on digital are up an average of 122 percent as of the third week of March. And the pace is accelerating: “a 35% increase from Week 2 to Week 3 [and] no signs of slowing down as we enter the last week of March,” according to Pete Doucette, now a managing director at FTI Consulting. Doucette played a big part in building The Boston Globe’s digital audience and subscription business. His comprehensive take on digital subscriptions, and how to maximize both volume and pricing at this critical juncture is a must-read for all in the business. (The Local News Initiative at Medill offers an excellent roundup as well. )

These trends, we must underline, are global — both the traffic gains and the revenue losses. Major German publishers like Bild and Spiegel Online “all have huge gains,” according to journalist Ulrike Langer. “But none of these publishers have been able to monetize their huge rise in traffic volume in terms of advertising. Ad volume has sharply declined and most advertisers don’t want to see their ads next to coronavirus news.” Different continent, same issue.

What’s left to be “unthinkable”?

Humans are inherently adaptable. We have the life-affirming (and seemingly planet-destroying) capability of adapting to anything. We will adapt here too, no matter the human nor economic toll. A scale of destruction that would have once been “unthinkable” becomes quite thinkable indeed — then assessable, and then actionable. Those of us who’ve tracked the shrinking of the American press should have learned that lesson already.

We all expected a recession would arrive at some point, even if we thought of it kind of distantly, and we knew it would deal a new blow to the beleaguered newspaper industry. (In fact, I see that I’ve noted that possibility here at least three dozen times over the years — including this 2011 (!) entry, The newsonomics of the next recession.”)

Now that it’s arrived on our doorstep, our language has changed. Less “decline” and “deterioration,” more “annihilation” and “extinction“.

“Extinction” certainly draws a sharp picture, and it will be literally true for some of the press. But that picture may not be the most precise. More journalists gone. More publishers gone. Local news greatly reduced.

That’s all coming. But how do we — and the publics we serve — gauge what’s left?

The cuts at alt-weeklies and city magazines became public first. The earliest reports of cuts and layoffs at daily newspapers have begun to seep out. Expect a lot more of them. “Everyone’s making contingency plans,” one industry insider says. Layoffs, furloughs, salary cuts, four-day weeks — however it’s framed, cuts to staffing are on the way.

The fact that readers’ newfound appreciation of the local press is based on the work of those reporters and those newsrooms should limit the cuts. But they often won’t. And then there are the newspapers that have already been cut so much that they barely have enough people to put out a paper everyday. (And that’s before we see much of the most direct impact coronavirus can have on a news organization: sick journalists and other staffers whose extended absence from work makes everything harder.)

One wild card: the federal bailout, which features loans that can be turned into grants if companies maintain staffing. But it remains unclear if the scale of that help — and how accessible it is to publishers — will be enough to make a big difference.

Several years ago, Penny Abernathy’s mapping of America’s “news deserts” established a universal point of reference for discussions about local news. I’ve suggested that, for all the communities down to one or zero news sources, the bigger problem is the ghost newspapers that now pervade the landscape, stripped to the skeleton.

This crisis, like the declines of the past decade, will probably be less about pure extinction and more about new apparitions. Newspapers gutted in a way previously “unthinkable.” Badly wounded (but still faintly breathing) dinosaurs, if you will.

How do we judge if a newspaper is still “alive”? By most definitions, it’s the appearance of a product, usually in print but now digital, that carries a dignified nameplate, preferably in a familiar German blackletter font.

The financial companies that have and will continue to consolidate the local press — perhaps now at an accelerated pace — know that, and they’ve build a cynical strategy atop it. Keep the nameplate and fill the space between the ads with national wire copy, stories pretending to be “local” (but really from someplace three newspapers away), self-serving columns from mayors and local corporate leaders, and lots of low-cost calendar items.

“Fake news” is a truly odious epithet. But we’re now truly into the faux news era in local news. It’s a thin patina of fraudulent localness, packaged in the wrappings of a century ago, and priced at $600, $700, or $800 a year for seniors who nostalgically (or unknowingly, through the magic of the credit card) continue to pay until the day they don’t.

If we define “life” — or non-extinction — by the mere persistence of an old nameplate, we obscure the damage being done to local communities every single day. As we begin to list out the longer-term impacts of the current catastrophe, put that one higher on the list.

All of this — this March massacre of news revenue — is prologue, of course. We just don’t yet know what it’s prologue to. The 2020 calendar has never looked longer.

As one of the most successful, optimistic, and progressive of today’s publishers told me: “If it’s a couple of months, we’ll make it through. If it’s six months, all bets are off.”

Even before the coronavirus broke out and the stock market went into free fall, about two-thirds of Americans reported feeling “worn out” by the amount of news, according to recent Pew Research Center research.

Enter Drop Me The Link, a new politics newsletter from The Washington Post that promises to deliver election news in a manageable dose. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon, the Post will send a single link to a Post politics story alongside context that will help readers understand the news — and talk about it with friends.

The signup page promises subscribers can “use this newsletter to be the 2020 informer, the plugged-in friend, the Keeper of the Links.”

Three editors — that’s them in the “PostMojis” above — will select the links and unpack the political news:

Three editors at The Post will be sending you good reads: Ric Sanchez, a voice of The Post’s social platforms and Man About Town Internet; Krissah Thompson, an editor in Style with an eye for detail; and Terri Rupar, an editor in politics who was already texting her friends too many Post links anyway.

Drop Me The Link promises to be short and “respectful of the reader’s time,” including just one link per email and a chatty 200-word introduction that the writers hope sounds less like a summary and more like what’d you’d say when texting the article to a friend. There’s a brief section directing readers who want to learn more and a list of important dates (such as upcoming primaries or debates) and the first newsletter — which features a narrative piece selected by Rupar about a Sanders supporter who prefers the term “Bernard Brother” to “Bernie Bro” — also includes a link to live updates for primaries happening the next day.

The thrice-weekly newsletter is targeting younger or first-time voters and people who may have been apathetic in the past but are “newly awakened to their civic responsibility,” said Tanya Sichynsky, newsletter editor at the Washington Post. But it could appeal to anyone feeling besieged by headlines.

“There’s a ton of content out there. People are getting hit from all sides in terms of the news that they can read and where they can get it — and it can really feel overwhelming,” Sichynsky said. “Working at the Post, we see those problems ourselves. We’re constantly trying to read all the news all the time. We wanted to find a solution for those readers who potentially feel overwhelmed or intimidated by just the pace of coverage.”

When the Post team was brainstorming ways to reach readers who weren’t already tuned into their election coverage, two ideas kept coming up. The first was “less is more” — asking readers to read fewer links — and the second was the insight that news that could feel overwhelming in other contexts felt less so in more intimate conversations, including group chats.

“I wanted something that felt like it could be a baby born of both of those strategies,” Sichynsky said. “Something that really serves the core politics coverage goals of the Post, but also had a feeling of accessibility and approachability.”

Drop Me The Link fits with that prioritization of national politics coverage as well as a renewed focus on digital subscriptions.

“The core strategy of the Post has been moving more and more toward the subscriptions base, so obviously newsletters is a massive part of that initiative,” Sichynsky said. But the Post also sees Drop Me The Link as a way to broaden their audience, just as their lifestyle and, especially, food newsletters have found an audience beyond politicos and media types.

Rupar, one of the three newsletter writers who will rotate throughout the week, was most excited about highlighting Post articles that readers seem to have missed on first pass.

“I think all of us have had the experience where there’s a story that you love and you’re asking, ‘Why isn’t everyone reading this story? Don’t they understand that this reporter is great and they found just the right person and just the right tone? And that it really helps you understand things?'” Rupar said. “This is also a chance to show people the one story you really wish that they would read.”

Drop Me The Link will publish its first edition this afternoon and the newsletter writers have been promoting the sign-up page with tweets, memes, and (what else?) a TikTok video.

Today’s @washingtonpost TikTok features @ricsanchez, @Krissah30 and @terri_rupar (their newsletter Drop Me The Link starts Monday) https://t.co/H7wsMoJTdc pic.twitter.com/0QSHNTZBz2

— Dave Jorgenson (@davejorgenson) March 6, 2020

if you’re, like, a normal person w/a job and friends and maybe a pet and you don’t have time to read the avalanche of everything, you should sign up for this newsletter i’m helping with.

we’ll send you ONE (1) link about the election, three days a week. https://t.co/0JJhgoPs8X — ric sanchez (@ricsanchez) March 5, 2020

do you:
wish the election news cycle would slow the heck down
want to tune out the 50-person cable news panels
want to cut through the noise and make sense of the 2020 race
love a good group chat
all of the above

well then this is for you https://t.co/YXepBjeZSS — Tanya Sichynsky (@tanyasic) March 4, 2020

tell your group chat about our new election newsletter https://t.co/PyWJWAtNGT pic.twitter.com/GIXvRbc8aS

— Tanya Sichynsky (@tanyasic) March 3, 2020

Super Tuesday is… a lot. And the campaign is just heating up! Feeling overwhelmed?

Sign up for “Drop Me The Link,” our new newsletter gives you the single most interesting 2020 story that Post editors are sending to their group chats. https://t.co/Jy0UvpRWJ8 — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 3, 2020

The first edition of Drop Me The Link is in inboxes TODAY. We promise: one link, great reporting, an email you’ll be happy to open. Sign up! https://t.co/H0SZWU6Lu2

— Terri Rupar (@terri_rupar) March 9, 2020

But none of this greetings revisionism has stopped anyone from launching pop-up news products. If you’re itching for more information about coronavirus and its specific impacts, there’s a product for you and it’s probably free. There are so many coronavirus newsletters popping up that even the same Twitter jokes are going viral.

A newsletter about all your coronavirus newsletters.

— erin mccann | (@mccanner) March 3, 2020

Sign up for my newsletter about the spread of coronavirus newsletters.

— Meg Marco (@meghann) March 3, 2020

A (necessarily partial) list:

Yesterday, CNN launched Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction, a free daily podcast hosted by chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. In the first episode, Gupta addresses some of the most common questions about the virus. Today’s episode is about the effectiveness of face masks in reducing spread of the virus.

Quartz’s newsletter Coronavirus: Need to Know is also free and will inform subscribers about how the virus is affecting the global economy a few times a week. The first edition is expected to go out today.

The Coronavirus Newsletter by BuzzFeed News breaks down the number of cases in the U.S. and around the world and provides one update a week, including a “tip of the day.” The first one: Don’t go shopping for face masks because they don’t prevent infection. (Another tip: Click on the tweet below to see the payoff at the bottom of the image.)

Awkward email cut-off point for @BuzzFeedNews' new coronavirus newsletter pic.twitter.com/31K68ByR3w

— Rob Price (@robaeprice) March 2, 2020

Morning Consult, which specializes in survey research and polling, is now updating its weekly consumer confidence indices every day to track consumer responses to the virus.

Viral: Coronavirus, a weekly podcast from the studio Three Uncanny Four, launched yesterday with a 28-minute primer on what the virus is, why this virus has a specific name, and the effects it’s had on the market.

The Washington Post’s To Your Health: Coronavirus newsletter is a takeover of the regular To Your Health newsletter and is focused on general interest coronavirus news, with bullet-point updates on major stories and links to other reporting by the Post on the virus.

NEW: We launched the @washingtonpost's special coronavirus newsletter today, which I'll be authoring with @ReisThebault. As long as virus dominates the news, we'll deliver the latest straight to your inbox.

Sign up here — then wash your hands. https://t.co/5A0lI8EhgO pic.twitter.com/NCXCKlqI6N

— Angela Fritz (@angelafritz) March 2, 2020

The New York Times’ Coronavirus Briefing daily newsletter sums up the day’s major developments and offers tips on what you need to know after reading the updates. It also includes an FAQ at the bottom of the newsletter with answers to basic questions about the virus.

sorry to tell you this, but you should probably sign up for the Coronavirus Briefing, a new @nytimes newsletter that will send you non-hysterical updates every night. sorry. https://t.co/xnU8oZHM5p

— Sam Dolnick (@samdolnick) February 26, 2020

The NYT's pop-up coronavirus newsletter. You can print it out and use it as a facemask. https://t.co/JwJxW7ofiO

— Neal Freyman (@Neal_Freyman) February 26, 2020

USA Today has launched its own Coronavirus Watch newsletter, which includes answering questions from readers. (“Gary in Victorville, Calif., wants to know: Are medical masks effective in preventing infection?”)

In local news, The Dallas Morning News will send out breaking news updates in a newsletter starting tomorrow about “the latest on the coronavirus and how it’s affecting Texans locally, across in the U.S., and internationally.” The DMN’s homepage also lists “Coronavirus Updates” as the top issue under its “What Matters” section.

We're launching a #coronavirus popup newsletter. Sign up here to get the latest on how the disease is affecting us in D-FW — for free — straight to your inbox. https://t.co/e4Y9CUs2BS

— Jesus Jiménez (@jesus_jimz) March 2, 2020

In the Pacific Northwest, the region of the U.S. hardest hit thus far, The Oregonian is publishing Oregon Coronavirus News each day at 1 p.m. PT, starting out with local updates then spreading out to news from the region, country, and world.

KUOW in Seattle has live blog updates in English and Spanish on its website as there have been 17 confirmed cases of the virus in Washington.

Stephen Stirling, the project editor for Columbia Journalism Investigations, started his own daily newsletter Coronaviral on updates in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (and Pennsylvania, depending what you include in tri-state). Stirling wants to track the fluctuation of people wearing surgical masks on the subway compared to major news updates and asks for submissions.

Tired of the coronavirus info firehose? I started a free, evening coronavirus newsletter for the NYC metro.

Sourced, local data and info. Apolitical. If we're all gonna die, you might as well have a handle on why.

Sign up here: https://t.co/S4oGGK3HIn

— Stephen Stirling (@SStirling) March 3, 2020

McClatchy launched a daily update newsletter called Coronavirus: Latest News that rounds up coverage from all of its 29 properties and goes out at 5 p.m. ET. Some of its local newspapers will send out the same daily newsletter to its subscribers while other properties on the west coast will be more locally focused.

And all of that isn’t even counting the various Substack newsletters and podcasts coming from non-media sources, even random citizens. (Searching your favorite podcast app will turn up dozens of shows, a number of them seemingly from people just looking to ride the wave of interest.)

these coronavirus podcast episodes are so bleak guys

— Amy Pedulla (@amypedulla) March 2, 2020

No thank you. I don't want to watch your coronavirus webinar, listen to your coronavirus podcast, read your coronavirus blog, newsletter or special report, subscribe to your coronavirus text alerts or participate in your coronavirus roundtable discussion 1/

— Joar (@JoarGarrosh) March 3, 2020

So if you’re sitting in your newsroom right now and wondering if you should jump on this train, here are some tips from the Asian American Journalists Association on how you shouldn’t report on coronavirus.

We urge media to be mindful of photos, context and word choice surrounding #coronavirus.

We warn against usage of:

-images of people wearing face masks without proper context
-generic images of Chinatown if unrelated to story
-the term “Wuhan virus”https://t.co/5pEN7WT0i0

— AAJA National (@aaja) March 3, 2020

Now wash your hands.

When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll come back. It’s cyclical.” No one tells me that anymore. The old business is plainly rotting away, even as I find myself still documenting the scavengers who turn detritus into gold.

The surviving — growing, even — national news business is now profoundly and proudly digital. All the wonders of the medium — extraordinary storytelling interactives and multimedia, unprecedented reader-journalist connection, infinitely searchable knowledge, manifold reader revenue — illuminate those companies’ business as much as digital disruption has darkened the wider news landscape.

What is this world we’ve created? That’s the big-picture view I’m aiming to offer here today.

Those of us who care about journalism were happy to see the 2010s go. We want a better decade ahead for a burning world, a frayed America, and a news business that many of us still believe should be at the root of solving those other crises.

I call what follows below my epiphanies — honed over time in conversations around the world, with everyone from seen-it-all execs to young reporters asking how things came to be the way they are in this business. These are principles that help me make sense of the booming, buzzing confusion that can appear to envelop us. Think of it as an update to my book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, now a decade old.

Here I’ve distilled all my own concerns and my understandings. I’ve taken a big-picture, multiyear view, knowing that like it or not, we’re defining a new decade. You’ll see my optimism here — both as a longtime observer and as a later-stage entrepreneur trying to build out a new model for local news. (I wrote about that back in October.) I do believe that we can make the 2020s, if not quite the Soaring ’20s, something better than what we just went through. But I balance my optimism with my journalism-embued realism. In many ways, 2020 stands at the intersection of optimism and realism — a space that’s shrinking.

So much has gone off the rails in the news industry (and in the wider society) over the past decade. Amid all the fin-de-la-décennie thinking, I think Michiko Kakutani best described the country’s 10-year experience: “the indigenous American berserk,” a borrowing from Phillip Roth.

So much of what happened can be attributed to (if not too easily dismissed as) “unintended consequences.” Oops, we didn’t mean to turn over the 2016 election to Putin. Gosh, we didn’t mean to alter life on earth forever — we just really wanted that truck. We just wanted to connect up the whole world through the Internet — we didn’t mean to destroy the institutions that sort through the facts and fictions of civic life.

As billions have disappeared from the U.S. newspaper industry, the words “collateral damage” served to explain the revolution that led digital to become the leading medium for advertising. That damage is now reaching its endgame.

The Terrible Tens almost precisely match the period I’ve been writing here at Nieman Lab. In that time, I’ve written enough to fill several more books — 934,800 words before this piece. Almost a million words somehow accepted by our loyal readers, who still, remarkably, laugh and tell me: “Keep writing long.”

Let’s then start the 2020s off right. With one eye on the last decade and another on the one to come, let me put forward 20 understandings of where we are and how we build from here.

That felt like huge news — but what if it really only represents the beginning of a greater rollup? Last month, I sketched out how five of the largest chains could become two this year.

And yet there are even worse potential outcomes for those of us who care about a vibrant, independent press. What if a Sinclair, bent on regional domination and with a political agenda, were to buy a rollup, and keep rolling?

In a way, GateHouse’s builder Mike Reed has done a lot of the heavy lifting already. From a financial point of view, the CEO of New Gannett has already done a lot of rationalization. GateHouse bought up a motley collection of newspaper properties, many out of long-time family ownership, and brought some standard operating principles and efficiencies to them. We can ask whether his big gamble of borrowing $1.8 billion (at 11.5 percent interest) from Apollo Global Management will prove out over the next few years. Or we can think of that megamerger as just prologue.

After all, the same logic that drove the GateHouse/Gannett deal pervades the near-uniform thinking of executives at all of the chains. Job No. 1: Find large cost savings to maintain profitability in light of revenue declines, in the high single digits per year, that show no sign of stopping. And the easiest way to do that is merging. A merger can massively — if only once — cut out a lot of HQ and other “redundant” costs.

It buys some time. And newspaper operators are craving more time. “Ugly” is the simple description of the 2020 newspaper business offered to me by one high-ranking news executive. Revenue declines aren’t improving, so the logic remains. The only questions are: How much consolidation will there be, and how soon will it happen?

Heath Freeman, head of journalistic antihero Alden Global Capital, has already begun to answer that question. The hedge-fund barbarians aren’t just inside Tribune Publishing’s gates — they’re settled in around the corporate conference table. Alden’s cost-cutting influence drives the first drama of the year: Can Chicago Tribune employees fend off the bloodletting long enough to find a new buyer for their newspaper before it’s too late? They know that, despite a national upswell in public support for the gutted Denver Post in 2018, Alden was able to remain above the fray and stick to its oblivious-to-the-public-interest position.

Meanwhile, McClatchy is trying to thread a needle of financial reorganization. Then there’s Lee, operator of 46 largely smaller dailies. All of them are subject (and object) of the same financial logic.

While financing remains tough to get, at any price, there remains an undeniable financial propulsion to bring many more titles under fewer operations.

There’s no law preventing one company from owning half of the American daily press. And no law prevents a political player like a Sinclair — known for its noxious enforcement of company politics at its local broadcast properties — from buying or tomorrow’s MergedCo — or orchestrating the rollup itself.

After a decade where we’ve seen the rotten fruit of political fact-bending, what could be more effective than simply buying up the remaining sources of local news and shading or shilling their coverage? Purple states, beware! Further, the price would be relatively cheap: Only a couple billion dollars could buy a substantial swatch of the U.S.’s local press.

Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry.

It sometimes seems like we’ll run out of epithets — “the Thanos of the newspaper business,” “the face of bloodless strip-mining of American newspapers and their communities,” “industry vulture,” “the newspaper industry’s comic-book villain” — for Alden Global Capital. Then someone helps us out.

“Alden is a virus in the newspaper industry,” one very well-connected (and quite even-keeled) industry executive told me dispassionately. “It just destroys the story we try to tell of the great local journalism we need to preserve.”

Think about the big picture. The industry is flailing; behind closed doors, it’s throwing a Hail Mary, trying to win an antitrust exemption from Congress. It argues that in the public interest, it should be allowed to negotiate together (rather than as individual companies) with the platforms. It wants the big payoff they’ve dreamed of since the turn of the century: billions in licensing from Google, Facebook, and Co.

It pines for and makes comparison to the kinds of licensing revenue that both TV broadcasters and music publishers have been able to snag. But thus far, that’s been a heavy lift in terms of negotiation or public policy. But Alden adds more weight, letting governments or platforms say: “Wait, you want us to help them?”

Which leads to…

Can a duopoly licensing deal be the “retrans” savior of the local news business?

In 1992, local TV companies were in a bind. Cable and satellite companies had to pay the ESPNs and CNNs of the world to air their programming. But local TV stations — available for free on the public airwaves — got nothing for having their signal distributed to cable customers.

But that year, federal legislation allowed local TV stations to demand compensation from cable and satellite systems — retransmission fees. Essentially, distributors paid stations for the right to their programming, including local news — despite the fact that anyone with an antenna could get their signal for free.

What started out as a small supplemental revenue stream now amounts to about 40 percent of all local TV station revenue, according to Bob Papper, the TV industry’s keen observer and data/trend collector through his annual RTDNA survey. “Retrans money is skyrocketing, and that should continue until it levels off in 2023-24.” This year, it will likely add up to $12 billion or more.

Advertising revenue has been fairly flat for local TV companies (setting aside for a moment the two-year cycle in which election years pump them full of political cash). Digital revenue hasn’t been much better, accounting for only six or seven percent of station income, Papper says — way less than newspaper companies earn.

And yet these local TV businesses are stable, profitable, and facing nothing like what’s happened to newspaper newsrooms. Papper notes the wide variance across stations in the depth and breadth of their news products. While many still stick with the tried-and-tired formulas, his surveys of station managers list “investigative reporting” as their No. 1 priority. When it’s funded, it’s a differentiator in crowded TV markets.

It’s that retrans money that makes all the difference.

Clearly, the news industry is a major supplier of high-engagement material to the platforms — a supply that helps energizes their dominant ad businesses. While both Google and Facebook have deployed a motley fleet of news industry-supporting initiatives, they’ve steadfastly refused any large-scale “licensing” arrangements.

If there’s increased public pressures on the platforms as the society’s digital high turns part-bummer, and if the political environment were to change (a President Elizabeth Warren, for example), it’s not hard to imagine the tech giants ponying up a billion here or there for democracy-serving news, right? (Both Google and Apple count more than $100 billion in cash reserves, net of debt, with Facebook holding more than $50 billion.)

Google, when asked over the years why it doesn’t pay license fees, talks about the complexity of the news market, among other objections. Expect a new argument: You want us to pay an Alden, or a Fortress Investment Group?

The financialization of the press may indeed makes the daily newspaper “public service” argument more difficult to make. While still true — though now wildly uneven in its actual daily delivery — it might be an artifact of a bygone age. The question may turn from “Will platforms finally pay license fees?” to “Who can make a good argument that they deserve them?”

The first metric that matters is content capacity.

In our digital world, just about everything can be counted. So many numbers adding up to so few results for so many.

Look forward and we can see that content capacity is and will be among the biggest differentiators between the winners and losers of the news wars. In fact, I’d call it a gating factor. Publishers who can offer up a sufficient volume of unique, differentiated content can win, assuming they’ve figured out ways for their business to benefit from it.

People aren’t the problem, no matter what the headcount-chopping Aldens of the world have preached. People — the right journalists and the right digital-savvy business people — are the solution.

In models as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Athletic, The Information, the Star Tribune, and The Boston Globe, we see this truism play out.

Certainly, having more skilled journalists better serves the public’s news needs. But the logic here is fundamentally a business one. In businesses increasingly dependent on reader revenue, content capacity drives the value proposition itself.

Rather than reducing headcount — and thus spinning the downward spiral more swiftly — increasing headcount can lead to a magic word: growth.

The news business will only rebound when it seeks growth.

Across America’s widening expanse of news deserts, we don’t hear many whispers of that word, growth. The conversation among owners and executives is pretty consistent: Where do we cut? How do we hold on?

That’s meant more M&A. More cutting print days. More cutting of business operations. More cutting of newsrooms. All in an effort to preserve a diminishing business — whether the underlying mission is to maintain even a semblance of a news mission or just to milk the remaining profits of an obsolescent industry.

Of course, local news publishers poke at new revenue streams to try to make up for print ad revenues that will likely drop in the high single digits for the fourth year in a row. But the digital ad wars have been lost to Google and Facebook. Marketing services, a revenue stream pursued with much optimism a few years ago, has proven to be a tough, low-margin business. Digital subscription sales are stalled around the country, not least because of all that cutting’s impact on the product. Most see no path to a real “replacement” revenue stream. (Maybe CBD-infused newsprint?)

Cutting ain’t working. Decline feeds decline.

Only an orientation toward growth — with strategies that grab the future optimistically and are funded appropriately — can awaken us from this nightmare. Replace “replacement” strategies with growth strategies and these businesses look different.

Happily, we do have growth models to look at. Take, most essentially to the current republic, our two leading “newspapers.”

Today, The New York Times pays 1,700 journalists. That’s almost twice as many as a decade ago. The Washington Post pays 850, up from 580 when Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013.

The result: More unique, high-quality content has driven both publishers to new heights of subscription success, the Times how with three times as many paying customers as it had at its print apex. Readers have rewarded the investment, and those rewards have in turn allowed further investment.

It’s a flywheel of growth — recognizable to anyone who’s ever built a business, large or small. What it requires is a long-term view and patience. And, of course, capital in some form — which shouldn’t be a problem in a rich country awash in cash. But what it also demands is a belief in the mission of the business, an in-part seemingly irrational belief that the future of the news business can, and must, be robust.

Some big numbers tell the big story.

• We may have underestimated the dominance of the New Gannett. According to Dirks, Van Essen, Murray & April, the leading newspaper broker, the new Gannett now owns:
  • 20.4 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers
  • 26.3 percent of all U.S. daily print circulation
  • 24.8 percent of all U.S. Sunday print circulation

  So in rough terms, it controls a quarter of our daily press. The chart below, produced by the brokerage, compares the megamerger to the industry’s previous big deals on the basis of percentage of newspapers owned and percentage of circulation controlled. It should send a chill down every American spine.



• There are probably fewer than 20,000 journalists working in U.S. daily newspaper newsrooms. There’s not even a semi-official tally anymore, but that’s a good extrapolation from years past, given all the cutting since. That compares to 56,900 in 1990 — when the country had 77 million fewer people than today.
• The daily press still depends on the print newspaper for 70 percent or more of its revenue. That’s after 20 years of “digital transition.”
• The daily newspaper industry today takes in more than $30 billion less per year than it did at its height.
• $1 trillion: The market value reached by Alphabet (Google) last week.

The brain drain is real.

What’s the biggest problem in the news business? The collapse of ad revenue? Facebook? Dis- and misinformation? Aging print subscribers?

Surprisingly, over the last year numerous publishers and CEOs have confided what troubles them most: talent.

It’s hard enough to take on all the issues of business and social disruption with a staff that can meet the challenge. Increasingly, though, it’s hard for news companies to attract and retain the talent they need, especially in the business, product, and technology areas that will determine their very survival.

Who wants to work in an industry on its deathbed? Especially in an already tight job market.

What do the people who could make a difference in the future of news want? Fair compensation, for sure, and local news companies often pay below-market wages, on the TV side as much as in newspapers. Perhaps more important, they want a sense of a positive future — one their bosses believe in and act on every day. That’s a commodity scarcer than money in this business.

No industry has a future without a pipeline of vital, young, diverse talent eager to shape the future. And that’s especially true in the live-or-die arts of digital business. As the just-released Reuters Institute for Journalism 2020 trends report notes, “Lack of diversity may also be a factor in bringing new talent into the industry. Publishers have very low confidence that they can attract and retain talent in technology (24%) and data science (24%) as well as product management (39%). There was more confidence in editorial areas (76%).”

At the same time, we’ll be watching the flow of experienced talent as it moves around the industry. As Atlantic Media continues to grow and morph under the Emerson Collective, a number of its top alumni are moving into new positions elsewhere. Longtime Atlantic president Bob Cohn now takes over as president of The Economist — an early digital subscription leader, the storied “newspaper” now seeks growth. Meanwhile, Kevin Delaney, co-founder of Atlantic Media’s innovative Quartz, has taken on a so-far-unannounced big project at The New York Times’ Opinion section, where the appetite for impact has grown appreciably.

Finally, as The Guardian ended the decade with happy reader revenue success, Annette Thomas becomes CEO. Thomas has earned accolades for her innovative work in science publishing. These three, plus numerous others moving into new jobs as 2020 begins, can now bring their decades of digital experience to the job of getting news right in the ’20s.

Print is a growing sore spot; expect more daycutting.

Just for a moment, forget the thinned-out newsrooms and consider a fundamental truth: The physical distribution system that long supported the daily business is falling apart.

The paperboys and papergirls of mid-20th-century America have faded into Norman Rockwell canvases. As Amazon’s distribution machine and Uber and Lyft suck up available delivery people across the country, publishers say it’s increasingly hard to find paper throwers. (And why not? Paper-throwing sounds like a sport from another age.)

Why not just throw in with the logistics geniuses of the day, and partner with them to deliver the papers? The newspaper industry has indeed had talks with Amazon, buyer of 30,000 last-mile delivery trucks over the past two years. We’ll probably see some local efforts to converge delivery. But think about who still gets that package of increasingly day-old news delivered to their doorstep? Seniors — who want the paper bright and early, complicating delivery partnerships.

Not to mention that, with print subscribers declining in the high single digits every year, deliverers now need to cover a wider geography to deliver the same number of papers — and that problem will only get worse.

To add an almost comic complication to the challenge of dead-tree delivery: California’s AB5 just went into effect. Its admirable aim is to bring fairer benefits to those in the gig economy. But its many unintended consequences are now cascading throughout the state — spelling millions more in costs to daily publishers while wreaking havoc among freelancers.

Is seven-day home delivery now a luxury good? Or just a profit-squeezing artifact? Either way, it’s become clear that publishers’ years of price increases for seven-day aren’t sustainable. One of my trusty correspondents reported this last week that he’s now paying $900 a year for the Gannett-owned Louisville Courier-Journal. There are Alden-owned papers charging more than $600 a year for ghost titles, produced by a bare handful — sometimes two — journalists.

As print subscriptions have declined, publishers have continued to price up. That’s death-spiral pricing, with a clear end in sight and boatloads of money to be made on the way out the door.

Earlier this year, I wrote about “the end of seven-day print” and how publishers have been modeling and noodling its timeline. There’s been lots of trimming around the edges, mainly at smaller papers; McClatchy’s decision to fully end Saturday print is a harbinger of what’s to come. The company planned the end of Saturdays meticulously, with a keen eye toward customer communication, and proved to both itself and the industry that it can be done.

(Let’s allow time here for a brief chuckle by European publishers who have been successfully publishing “weekend” papers for decades.)

But cutting Saturday alone doesn’t save you a lot of money. Those twin pressures — on one hand, needing ever-larger cost savings, on the other, the collapsing distribution system — mean we’ll see more ambitious and adventurous cutting in the year to come. They’ll do while swallowing the existential fear one CEO shared: “They are scared to death this will end the habit.”

How big a deal is all this — the declining mechanics of print distribution? Very big.

Consider that The New York Times — the most successfully transitioned of newspaper companies — still only earns only 43 percent of its revenue from digital. Most regional dailies still rely on print for 75 to 90 percent of their overall revenue. If the physical distribution system starts failing faster, how much of that print-based revenue — circulation and advertising — can be converted to digital?

At a national level, the direct connection between readers and journalists has never been stronger.

Listen to the commercial breaks of The New York Times’ breakaway hit The Daily. A lot of them aren’t commercial spots, but what we used to call house ads in the print business. Maggie Haberman talking about Times’ reporting in the era of press vilification; Rukmini Callimachi sharing the danger and cost of reporting from terror-stricken parts of the world.

These ads aren’t about making the newsroom feel better — they work. The Times now has more than three times the total paying customers than it did at the height of print, with 3.9 million digital news subscribers paying the Times. Why? The journalists and the journalism.

In the halcyon days of print, advertising drove 75 percent of the Times’ revenue, a number that often hit 80 percent for local dailies. Now the digital world has forced — but also enabled — the Times to forge a very direct connection between its journalists and readers. Readers understand much more clearly that they are paying for high-quality news and analysis. They value expertise and increasingly get to know these journalists individually, whether through podcasts or other digital extensions.

Journalists believe more than ever that they are working for the reader, with the Times the trustworthy intermediary. The new more direct relationship between reader and journalist fosters growth. And the same is true similarly for The Washington Post, The Athletic, and The Information, in different forms.

If the local news world had followed suit, we’d say that the age of digital disruption has been a boon for journalism overall. Clearly, it hasn’t. This lesson is a guidepost for the decade ahead.

Advertising remains a vital — but secondary — source of revenue for news publishers.

The war’s over; the platforms won. With Google and Facebook maintaining a 60 percent share of the digital ad market (and 70 percent of local digital ads), publishers no longer expect to grab a bigger slice of the pie. The drama drawing the most attention: How much will Amazon eat into The Duopoly, as Mediaocean CEO Bill Wise summed up “the five trends that threaten the Google/Facebook duopoly” at AdAge.

Contrary to some of the conventional wisdom of the moment, that doesn’t mean advertising is no longer a part of publishers’ diversified revenue streams. Yes, reader revenue is clearly the driver for successful publishers of the ’20s, but advertising — best when sold and presented in ways that don’t compete directly with the platforms — will be in the passenger seat.

The evolving formula of the early ’20s is a mix of 65 to 70 percent reader revenue, 20 to 30 percent in advertising, and then an “other” that includes things like events. While this model may be more diversified, it’s not made of discrete parts. The better publishers get at profiling their reader-revenue-paying customers, with increasingly better-used first-party data, the better they can help advertisers sell. At this point, it’s a wobbly virtuous circle of money and data, and the successful publishers will find ways to round it.

A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension.

The word of the moment in almost every conversation about local news is “nonprofit.” At so many conferences and un-conferences about the news emergency, the notion that there’s a commercial answer to rebuilding the local business seems almost out of bounds.

What created this anti-profit sensibility? Acknowledging the power of the duopoly, to be sure. But that’s not the only rationale. For generations, many journalists considered themselves proudly unaware or uncaring about the business. Now the ascendance of Google and Facebook has given too many permission to eschew advertising as a significant, if secondary, support of reporting.

Secondly, the industry’s Heath Freemans and Michael Ferros, among too many others, have stained a local news business that was once both proudly profitable and mission-driven. Profiteering is now associated by many with local news.

Nonprofit news, too, though requires capital — just like any kind of growing service or product. Somebody has to actually pay journalists. So those advocating nonprofit news as the new future have turned to philanthropy. They look to foundations, national and local, to finance this vision. Nationally, more than $40 million has now flowed into the American Journalism Project, headed by Elizabeth Green and John Thornton. Most of that’s come from national foundations. The AJP announced its first grants in December, a down payment on what it envisions as a fund of up to $1 billion.

Now we’ll see if AJP can significantly move the needle on what is plainly needed: replacement journalism. As it tries to catalyze a movement, it hopes to multiply the philanthropic response to the news crisis. It’s a hope we can share. AJP’s pitch is straightforward: Communities should support news the same way they support public goods like the ballet and the opera, things that in many cities plainly couldn’t sustain themselves as creatures of the market.

That’s a worthy thought, but with two big issues attached.

One: There’s not much of a tradition of such support. Newspapers made so much money for so many years that they were the ones who started foundations, not the ones asking them for money. Relatively few communities’ foundations are oriented in that direction — and foundations don’t change direction or priorities speedily.

Two: Scale. So much local news coverage has been lost that it would take substantial and ongoing philanthropy to even begin to resupply community news. There’s not a lot of evidence yet of a readiness to do that.

To be sure, hundreds of dedicated journalists have build smaller operations in cities across the country. LION Publishers and the Institute for Nonprofit News are looking for new and better ways to support and nurture them. But the old world is disappearing far faster than a new one is being created.

Ace industry researchers Elizabeth Hansen and Jesse Holcomb recently laid out their thinking, which should serve as a reality check for all who care about the next decade of local news.

Yet even with a game-changing funding renaissance in local news (which would require the significant participation of community foundations), it probably won’t be fast enough or big enough to refill the bucket as local newspaper talent and jobs continue to drain away. There may not be enough philanthropic capital, even on the sidelines, to support the scope and depth of local news-gathering that our democracy requires.

But it was the concluding paragraph of their Nieman Lab prediction that really best summed up this epiphany looking ahead to the end of this decade.

A New(s) Deal for the 21st century: If all forms of philanthropic support for local news are truly not enough, we predict that by the end of 2030, we’ll be seeing large-scale policy changes to publicly support more sources of local news. It may not seem like we’re that close on this one, but trust us, it could happen.

I know Hansen and Holcomb are trying to spark a note of optimism, but their realistic reading of the landscape should strike terror: A local news-less 2030 America is a fright beyond comprehension. Imagine this struggling country 10 years from now if the news vacuum has become the new normal and our communities are democratically impoverished.

My own view: All good journalism is good. Support it by philanthropy, advertising, events, reader revenue, or by winning lottery ticket. Given the peril, we all need to look more widely for support, not more narrowly.

The free press needs to be a better advocate of free peoples in the 21st century.

The Wall Street Journal has long proclaimed itself the paper of free people and free markets. That formulation has made a lot of sense over time in the face of state-run economies of various flavors. But it’s insufficient to meet the demands of today.

Free peoples — those able to speak, write, assemble, vote, and retain some dignity of privacy — make up an uneasy minority of the world’s population. Now the twin dangers of growing strongman despotism and tech-based surveillance societies threaten us all.

Most recently, The New York Times’ investigative report on facial recognition painted a deeply disturbing dystopian portrait. The piece came on the heels of many beginning to describe China’s “surveillance state,” an ominous system intend to enable lifelong tracking and rewarding of state-approved citizen behavior.

We’re moving from a decade of cookies gone wild to what until recently seemed to be Orwellian fiction.

Combine the tech with the spreading rash of authoritarianism afflicting the globe. From Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to, yes, our current White House, the 2010s produced strongmen who we thought had been relegated to the history books.

Who best to represent free people in the coverage of would-be despots and in the tech-driven threats to several centuries of hard-earned Western rights? A free and strong press.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Czech novelist Milan Kundera memorably told us in his 1980 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (John Updike’s masterful review of it is here).

Memory. Our job as journalists is to remember. To connect yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Like the climate crisis, the threat of a surveillance society registers only haphazardly among the American populace, even as California’s government and others begin to take it on.

We’ve seen the beginnings of a backlash against tech run amok, with Facebook’s role in the 2016 election a seeming turning point. But here we are again, as Emily Bell points out, going into another election with the same issues — and huge questions that go well beyond the social behemoth.

If news companies are, at their base, advocates for the public good, news companies must lead in securing a free society in the face of technological adventurism. Media needs to get beyond its self-interest — ah, first-party data! — and focus on the bigger picture.

Who better to take that stand than those who’ve long advocated free peoples and free thinking? Who better to do that — and perhaps be rewarded for it in reader support — than mission-oriented news media?

The press’ business revival is part and parcel of its advocacy for the people it serves.

Australia is burning, and Murdoch’s newsprint provided the kindling.

For years, Australian press watchers have pointed to the dangerous slanting of environmental news by much of the nation’s press. A majority of that press is controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s empire. And those papers, joined too often by other media, have long skewed the facts of climate change. The result is a society ill-prepared for the nightmare that’s befallen it.

While this month has seen more complaints about Murdoch publications’ coverage, they’re in line with what that coverage has looked like for years. Now even scion James Murdoch has spoken out, as have some of Murdoch’s employees, seeing the heartbreaking, country-changing toll the fires have taken on Australia.

History will record Rupert Murdoch’s three-continent toll on Western civilization. The Foxification of U.S. news, Brexit support, and Australia’s inferno serve as only three of the major impacts Murdoch’s press power has had around the world. It is a press power weaponized and then turned on the very societies it is supposed to serve.

And don’t let the whirl of events let you forget the odious phone hacking scandal. “The BBC reported last year that the Murdoch titles had paid out an astonishing £400m in damages and calculated that the total bill for the two companies could eventually reach £1bn,” former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger reminded us this week in discussing the British press’ tawdry history with the royals.

Disney, for one, has recognized the toxicity of Murdoch’s remaining brand. Fox Corporation now owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox News, and 28 local Fox television stations, among other media assets. But “Fox” is no longer part of Twentieth Century Fox, the storied studio, and related assets that Disney bought from Murdoch last year. Now it’s only out of sync when it comes to time: 20th Century Studios. (Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton offered up a wonderful history of the Fox brand in the U.S., beginning with a third of a Brooklyn nickleodeon 115 years ago, on Twitter.)

The Murdoch empire has generated plenty of good entertainment outside of its own brands — witness the Emmy-winning “Succession” and last month’s Bombshell. But we haven’t yet come to grips with how his publications’ fact-slanting has literally changed the faces of free societies.

Expertise rises to the top.

The end of the print era is killing off the generalist. Every daily newsroom has its legend of the reporter who could cover anything. Wake him up from a drunken stupor, point him (almost always him) out the door, and you’d get your story.

Great stories there sometimes were, but the legend exceeded the truth: Too much news reporting was a mile wide and an inch deep.

Flash forward to today: Ruthless digital disruption — of both reading and advertising — means that inch-deep stories have less and less value. (Remember back at the start of the last decade, the content farms — Demand Media, Contently, Associated Content — that were going to revolutionize journalism?)

If commodity journalism and sheer volume are out, one the most refreshing trends into the 2020s is single-subject journalism. It needs a better name, but the results have been profound. In topic after topic, the focus on expertise — in reporting, writing and increasingly presentation and storytelling — have produced their own revolution.

In health, we see Kaiser Health News excelling and expanding. In education, Chalkbeat (with its new five-year plan) and the Hechinger Report drill into the real issues of the field. They’re now being joined by the university/college-focused OpenCampus.org, seeking to bring the same level of experienced, knowledgeable journalism to the often-cloistered academy.

The Marshall Project squarely meets the many mushrooming questions around criminal justice in our society. InsideClimate News is growing to try to meet the interest, and panic, around a warming earth. More-than-single-subject-oriented ProPublica’s investigations, often done with partners, have done what great work is supposed to do: set and reset agendas. There are many more, including at the regional and state level, led by The Texas Tribune and CALmatters.

All together, they may add up to fewer than a thousand journalists at this point. But their impact is great, and I believe it will become greater as awareness and distribution increase.

As Google and Facebook have won the ad wars, pageview-thirsty commodity journalism has largely (and thankfully) met its demise. Now we’ll see how much the market — not just those foundations — will support real expertise in reporting.

Free media has better tech skills than state media.

While Iran’s state media was spending days denying any possibility its military had shot down the Ukranian airliner, The New York Times found the likely truth early on. It assembled its own small group of experts. It used the best tech available. And it could report (under an increasingly common four-person byline) that an Iranian missile had in fact likely done the deed.

It wasn’t about suspicions, guesses, or bombast. It was about finding a truth in plain sight — given the human and technological resources to do it.

At first, Iranians believed their own media, as NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly reported from Tehran, that the downing was U.S. propaganda. But then, amazingly and overnight, Iranian citizens responded to the American-driven truth. They piled into the streets, seeing the mistake and its coverup for what it was: another sign that their government, without its own checks and balances, couldn’t be trusted.

Watch what privately owned newspapers do.

By necessity, we pay a lot of attention to the industry’s M&A mating games. These largely involve the dwindling number of publicly owned newspaper companies, which struggle both with operating realities and the need to convince shareholders to hang on through short-term earnings and dividends. They’re the biggest players, the most riddled by financialization, and the ones who have to report numbers publicly.

But given today’s realities, the stock market really isn’t the place for newspaper companies to be. Only long-term, strategic, capital-backed, and for the most part private or family-controlled businesses can make it successfully to 2030.

In the middle part of the 2010s, those papers got more focus. John Henry with The Boston Globe. The Taylor family with the Star Tribune. Frank Blethen, fighting the long fight in Seattle. And then they were joined by Patrick Soon-Shiong with the L.A. Times and San Diego Union-Tribune.

For the most part, we don’t hear much news out of these enterprises. They don’t have to report to markets quarterly, and they’ve taken more of a no-drama-Obama approach to the tough business. They are also, not incidentally, the leaders in digital subscription among local dailies. They remain important to watch.

Just as importantly, consider two newspaper chains that keep their heads down: Hearst and Advance. In the early 2010s, Advance made lots of news by cutting print days at its papers in New Orleans, Portland, Cleveland, and elsewhere. It will likely soon get a fresher look: Long-time Advance Local CEO Randy Siegel announced last week that he’s stepping down. No successor has yet been named.

Hearst also remains intriguing. A very private company — and one now that now generates less than 10 percent of its revenue from newspapers — its very name bespeaks a long commitment. But the top two executives of what now is a profoundly diversified media company both grew outside of the news trade. Will it stand pat in its markets? Will it look for acquisitions? (The old GateHouse was its nemesis outbidding Hearst for the Austin and Palm Beach papers in 2018, but the Gannett deal should keep it out of the buying game for a while.) With antitrust enforcement apparently on the wane, will it try to build a cluster in the Bay Area around its San Francisco Chronicle? Or complete a Texas big-city triangle by adding The Dallas Morning News to its Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News?

Bankruptcy is nothing new in the newspaper industry.

McClatchy’s pension-led financial crisis in November surprised many. The words “potential bankruptcy” tend to focus the mind.

But consider this: By one close observer’s account, more than 20 daily newspaper companies have visited the bankruptcy courts since the Great Recession a decade ago.

Ironically, two of the ones that emerged became acquisitive consolidators. Today’s MNG Enterprises, driven by Alden’s in-court and out-of-court strategy, in fact declared bankruptcy twice in its various corporate iterations. GateHouse, re-birthed by Fortress Investment Group in 2013, was able to restructure debt totalling $1.4 billion — double what McClatchy now owes — and has gone to become the biggest newspaper company in the land, even able to buy the better-known Gannett name in the process.

So if McClatchy does indeed go into a pre-pack bankruptcy, the news won’t be that filing. It’ll be what the company does — as a business and journalistically — afterward.

We have to find a way to keep trillion-dollar stories in the public eye.

Through a year full of remarkable stories, perhaps the most remarkable was one that’s gotten little continuing attention.

In December, The Washington Post published “At War With The Truth.” It took the paper three years to pry loose the trove of documents through Freedom of Information requests. It is remarkable reporting, and one that put a price tag on our ignorance.

Here’s the lede: “A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”

The eerie parallels to the Pentagon Papers — a previous generation’s documentation of enormous waste, financial and human — were obvious. And yet it seems to have caused only small ripples in public discourse.

Politicians drive the daily news cycle, wielding wedge attacks on those — disabled, immigrant, poor — already falling through the now-purposely cut safety net. They say they do this in the name of saving taxpayer dollars. And yet this literal waste of $1 trillion pops in and out of the news in a politician’s second. This isn’t a question of politics; it’s a question of the public purse, and performing that watchdog role is our birthright as journalists.

As we reform and rebuild the journalism of the 2020s, we need to use the digital and moral tools of the day to hold power accountable and keep big stories alive over time. So far, we’ve barely touched the surface in connecting the latest happening to its deep historical context, making readers realize how a story connects to a larger issue or narrative, in ways both intuitive and knowledge-building.

I have confidence we’ll figure out how to do that in the 2020s.

“Mediatech” may be the new “convergence.”

There’s a new word taking hold out there: “mediatech”.

That’s how German behemoth Axel Springer is rebranding itself. CEO Mathias Dopfner and his team have rigorously pursued a transition away from print for more than a decade. “Mediatech” tells us both what they’ve learned and where they are going. In August, Dopfner’s new partner KKR bought out a minority interest in the company, taking it private and preparing it to be a bigger player this decade.

Springer, like its sometime partner Schibsted, will be one the big survivors in the brutal media game. Both have learned that modern journalism is now driven by both journalists and by technology. It’s the melding of the two — in audience definition, targeting, and service, and in product creation and delivery — that will determine the winners ahead.

Springer’s question for the ’20s: How much will the company keep investing in journalism itself, as it also pursues other digital business byways? Dopfner laid out the strategy, in friendly but direct sparring with Mark Zuckerberg, here.

Ah, life remains better in Perugia!

Travel coincidentally brought me to the doorstep of the most you-gotta-go-there journalism conference a couple of years ago. The name says most of it: the Perugia International Journalism Festival. Not a conference, or even an un- one, but a festival, inviting, of course, allusions to Nero fiddling. The truffled pasta and the views can’t be beat. The Sagrantino was magnificent.

The conference’s agenda and its exhibitor halls said it all. Walk into the main hall and Google and Facebook offered dueling expanses, with many enthusiastic company-clad representatives touting their latest and greatest. And half the agenda seemed to be, in apparently unintentional self-parody, sessions on how to work with…Facebook and Google. It’s the very best setting for platformitis.

In the time since, we’ve seen an even greater proliferation of news-aiding initiatives out of both companies. The new Reuters Institute study corroborates my own reporting, among publishers, of how that work is going and how it’s seen:

Google’s higher score [in the Institute’s own surveying] reflects the large number of publishers in our survey who are current or past recipients of Google’s innovation funds (DNI or GNI), and who collaborate with the company on various news-related products. Facebook’s lower score may reflect historic distrust from publishers after a series of changes of product strategy which left some publishers financially exposed.

The overall sense from our survey, however, is that publishers do not want hand-outs from platforms but would prefer a level playing field where they can compete fairly and get proper compensation for the value their content brings.

Short of that business-changing historic payout — see above — it’s unlikely that platform aid to publishers will itself significantly alter any of the trendlines in place.

There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscriptions.

Imagine if Reed Hastings has gone with advice of management consultants in the early 2000s, who might have “sized” the market for “on-demand” video and likely found it negligible. Netflix, nurtured on red envelopes, instead created a whole new category of customer demand — and willingness to pay.

As the company has grown, analysts have consistently undershot its growth potential, in the U.S. and globally. The company that was once asked “Will people really subscribe to on-demand movies?” reported on Tuesday that it now counts 167.1 million subscribers, and added 8.8 million in Q4 2019.

Upstart Disney (two words that don’t seem to pair) has already had its Disney+ app downloaded 40 million times. Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, CBS All Access, Peacock, and more are all opening wallets.

What’s instructive to the future of the news business here? There’s no natural ceiling to digital subscription, though media reporters love to ask me that question. Create a value proposition that works and consumers will pay. Obviously, national and global scale — what the Internet provides — are hugely helpful. It is though the product proposition that drives payment.

For a moment, consider all the digital subscription success stories in news: The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Athletic, The Boston Globe, the Star Tribune, and more. What if this is just prologue? Could better products — with more and more useful content, priced, sliced, and diced smartly — reproduce some of the scale success of streaming?

In a word, yes. And that’s our best hope for the decade ahead. Into the 2020s, bravely!

At The New York Times, the CEO, the publisher, the top editor, and the No. 2 editor are all men. Only one woman has been the top editor in the paper’s history, and that did not end well. The three leading candidates rumored to be battling to be the next top editor? All men.

Still, one female top editor in 169 years is somehow a better record than The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post, which have never had a woman in charge of the newsroom. At the Post today, the top editor and two of the three managing editors are men, as is the publisher/CEO. (Katherine Graham left active management all the way back in 1991.) At the Journal, the top editor, the No. 2 editor, and the publisher/CEO — all dudes.

So it’s been really interesting to see substantial progress on this front across the pond in the U.K. Okay, not in all U.K. media, but in two places in particular: The Guardian and the Financial Times.

The Guardian has women throughout top management. Its editor-in-chief is Katharine Viner; two of her three competitors for the job five years ago were women too. It just named Annette Thomas as its new CEO. While I’m sure women who work there would have legitimate complaints, it nonetheless stands out among its peers.

But you might expect the liberal Guardian to be an outlier, given its editorial values. Less expected would be the FT, which after all covers the still-extremely-male world of global business. Not to mention that it was bought four years ago by the Japanese publisher Nikkei, and Japanese business culture is even more male than those of the U.S. or U.K. (Three-quarters of Japanese companies have zero female senior executives.)

Still, the FT has done perhaps the most persistent work over the past few years to bring women in — into management and into its audience. (Our Laura Hazard Owen has written about the audience efforts a couple of times.)

Last week, Roula Khalaf officially took over as top editor, the first woman to hold the position in 131 years. Of its 11 top leaders, five are now women. In 2016, women made up 34 percent of its global management group; now that’s 45 percent. The FT requires that the shortlists for all job openings be 50/50 male/female “to ensure inclusive recruitment practices.” 51 percent of the paper’s managers are women.

The reason I’m bringing this all up is that Khalaf just announced that Janine Gibson, the former Guardian and BuzzFeed editor, has been named the FT’s head of digital platforms and projects. She also promoted Renée Kaplan to head of digital editorial development. Terrific choices both, and only the latest sign of the progress that’s been made in promoting women at the FT.

Again, the FT’s not perfect, and it still has a ways to go on issues including its gender pay gap. But it’s worth highlighting here precisely because it’s not the first newspaper you’d expect to be leading the way on gender representation. They’ve shown that, if an organization puts its mind to it, it can get a lot closer to equal representation in a short period of time. And that it’s the FT — one of the very smartest news publishers when it comes to digital innovation and revenue — should be a sign that it’s a good move for the business as well.

Today’s news? Trump’s new tariffs on steel and aluminum against Brazil and Argentina — plus an interview with former Bolivian president Evo Morales, who fled to Mexico after protests followed his re-election win in October. The episode also includes an interview en español with Post editor Marty Baron, who said he learned the language while working at the Los Angeles Times in the 1990s. The podcast — called, simply, El Washington Post and set to be released Tuesdays and Fridays — is hosted by journalists Juan Carlos Iragorri in Madrid, Dori Toribio in Washington, and Jorge Espinosa in Bogotá; it’s produced by Cecilia Favela.

“We got a proposal from Juan Carlos Iragorri about doing a podcast, and something about it spoke to us,” managing editor for digital Emilio Garcia-Ruiz told me. “We like the idea of going into a space where there wasn’t a lot of competition and yet it was a platform that we were doing a lot of work on already.”

His instinct that there might be an opening seems to be correct. Univision and Telemundo both have news podcast offerings; many Latin American countries have a robust history in news and current-affairs radio that has carried over to podcasting; on NPR, Latino USA has been around for 25 years, mostly in English. (Though it just announced “its first-ever podcast episode without any translation of non-English language spoken in the piece.”)

But news podcasts have had a harder time catching on in Spanish than they have in English. In Current, Fernando Hernández Becerra explained that factors like limited internet connectivity and the lack of audio infrastructure (like NPR and its affiliate stations) might contribute to why podcasts hadn’t boomed in Mexico. One of the most prominent Spanish-language podcast in the Americas, Radio Ambulante, has taken to hosting listening clubs across the region to expand its reach. “Latin America has this super-rich tradition of radio journalism,” the show’s Gaby Brenes told us in September, but the generational “gap of adopting podcasts is still there and it’s still large and evident.” El Washington Post seems to be the first news podcast by an American English-language publisher in Spanish.

The new show comes as part of a broader push into Spanish at the Post, which also includes Post Opinión, a new section with both original and translated op-eds.

Overall, the Post has not been as aggressive about reaching international audiences as its major national rivals. The Wall Street Journal has had Asian (founded 1976) and European editions (1983) for decades, and it runs Japanese- and Chinese-language editions online.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has made special editorial pushes in Canada and Australia, has run a Chinese-language edition since 2012, and created NYT en Español, a robust product that the Times shut down after three years in September.

When our Ken Doctor asked Times CEO Mark Thompson about the subject last month, he said the paper had “learned a lot from” NYT en Español, but that future international efforts were more likely to focus on improved marketing than the large-scale deployment of journalists. “I would say we’re going to continue experimenting internationally, but I think our view of international, in light of our own experience — I have to say, looking at others and seeing what, in particular, major journalistic deployments look like, in the end, it’s difficult to make sense of economically, generally,” he said. Today, 16 percent of Times digital subscribers live outside the United States, a number it wants to increase to 20 percent — 2 million subscribers in total — by 2025.

The Post also isn’t alone in seeing potential here. Last year, Radio Ambulante CEO and co-founder Carolina Guerrero predicted that 2019 would be the year that Spanish-language audio would blow up, saying that “in some ways, digital audio was made for the Spanish-language audience: With more than 400 million Spanish speakers from more than 20 countries, there is great potential to aggregate huge audiences with niche offerings.”

Garcia-Ruiz said that, because news podcasts in Latin America aren’t as popular as in the United States, the Post wants to be patient with growing El Post’s audience while still focusing on the stories that Spanish speakers would be most interested in understanding. “Like everything we do at the Post, we want to reach people who want Washington Post-level reporting about the important stories of the day,” he said. “In this case, we would love to get people who want to better understand what’s happening in Washington and what it means to them in the Spanish-speaking world.”

Each 20-minute episode will cover three or four stories of interest to Spanish speakers around the world, Iragorri said. El Post will also invite Spanish-speaking Washington Post reporters and editors to discuss their work whenever it’s relevant — like Marty Baron in today’s episode. In truth, today’s episode wasn’t all that different from what you might hear on an AM radio station. But its ambitions are global.

“I think people in the Spanish-speaking world want to know about what’s happening everywhere, in France, in the U.S., with Brexit, and of course what’s happening with Ecuador, the protests happening in Colombia, what’s happening Argentina and Chile,” Iragorri said. “It’s a kind of global podcast in Spanish.”

There’s been much written about podcasts in general — but less about news podcasts and the creative and commercial opportunities for publishers. That’s the focus of my new research (with Nathan Gallo), using podcast production data from five markets (U.K., U.S., Australia, France, and Sweden) along with interviews with around 30 leading publishers and broadcasters.

Daily news podcasts on the rise

One striking finding: the impressive performance of daily news podcasts, most of which have only launched in the past 18 months. The segment leader, The New York Times’ The Daily, has an audience of around 2 million people a day and appears at the top of Podtrac’s October podcast ranking, just ahead of NPR’s rival Up First. “We are thrilled to have 25 minutes a day with people that we didn’t have before,” says Erik Borenstein, director of audio at The New York Times (and a former Knight-Nieman Visiting Fellow). “We really think of The Daily as the new front page.”

Meanwhile, data from The Economist shows that The Intelligence, which is less than a year old, reaches 1.5 million people each month, with the average listener downloading three to four episodes each week. These are substantial audiences, even if they are not yet on a par with the most popular radio news shows in the U.S.

In the U.K., numbers are smaller but still substantial. In less than a year, The Guardian has built a bigger audience for its Today in Focus podcast than it has for its print newspaper. “It’s hundreds of thousands every day,” says The Guardian’s head of audio Christian Bennett, who notes that the podcast attracts a younger audience and features an 80 percent completion rate.

Our research found 60 different native news podcasts across our five countries (excluding daily catch-up radio shows), with many publishers telling us they were inspired by the success of The Daily. Le Parisien and Les Echos in France (Code Source and La Story respectively), Aftonbladet Daily in Sweden, The Guardian’s Today in Focus, and Schwartz Media’s 7am in Australia all follow a similar “one big story” format aimed at morning commuters. Other podcasts take a different approach with a wider mix of stories, such as Post Reports from The Washington Post and The Leader from the Evening Standard, both aimed at the early evening.

Publishers are making significant investments in news podcasts, hoping to attract younger audiences, build audience habits, and bring in additional revenue. Publishers say that blue-chip advertisers are now showing strong interest in podcasts, changing the economics. “There has been so much demand for sponsorship that it more than pays for itself,” said Tom Standage, who helped make the case for The Economist’s daily news podcast. “The big change is commercial, which is that we had advertisers who started to come to us last year and say, ‘We are only going to buy two kinds of ad next year, print and podcast. What have you got?'” But this optimism is not reflected in European markets like France or Sweden, where audiences are smaller and the ad market is not yet fully developed.

Production and editorial strategies

The New York Times employs around 15 dedicated people on The Daily. The Guardian employs 10 for Today in Focus and The Economist eight. At the other end of the scale, Schwartz Media, Le Parisien, and Les Echos each produce their daily podcasts with four or five — a more typical number for smaller publications starting out. The skillset tends to include one or two hosts, an executive producer, one or two producers, and a sound engineer/sound designer.

But news podcasts aren’t all about deep dives into a single story. Our research identified three sub-categories of daily news podcasts:

• Microbulletins, between 1 and 5 minutes, aimed at voice devices and new platforms like Spotify Drive (example: BBC Minute)
• News roundups, between 6 and 15 minutes (example: NPR’s Up First)
• Deep dives, between 15 and 30 minutes (example: The Daily)

Our report finds publishers from print or digital-born backgrounds focusing more on deep dives, playing to their strengths in analysis and explanation. By contrast, many broadcasters have focused on producing micro-bulletins and redistributing existing radio news programs as podcasts. Where they have commissioned digital-born podcasts, they’ve often been aimed at younger and more diverse audiences that they find hard to reach through linear channels.

Other opportunities for publishers

Outside daily news podcasts, we found publishers pursuing unscripted talk and interview formats. A number of the most successful are personality-led, such as The Ezra Klein Show (Vox) and Giles Coren Has No Idea (The Times of London). These are often relatively cheap to produce and reuse existing newsroom talent. By contrast, radio broadcasters have looked to leverage their skills in documentaries and audio production by creating one-off series. All the main broadcasters of the countries studied have invested in serialized podcasts. These include Death In Ice Valley — a true-crime podcast produced by the BBC and Norway’s NRK — and Russia If You’re Listening, a landmark series from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the Mueller Report and Russian interference in democracies.

News podcasts in the wider ecosystem

News podcasts make up only a small share of all podcasts — 6 percent, as Apple categorizes the 770,000 in its catalog — but the general appeal and stickiness of news content mean that the category outperforms other types of content in terms of consumption. News makes up 21 percent of the most popular episodes in the United States’ Apple Podcasts charts, according to the analytics company Chartable. It’s a similar picture in other countries, with 34 percent of the top podcast episodes in France categorized, as well as 18 percent in Sweden and Australia and 16 pertcent in the U.K. Across all genres, the number of new podcasts is growing at a rate of more than 200,000 a year, though that growth has started to slow a little.

Future prospects

New platforms are shaking up the podcast market, bringing new ideas and extra investment. Apple still accounts for the majority of podcast use, but music services are helping to popularise content, with Spotify doubling its market share in the past year. A number of podcast-specific paid content providers are commissioning original content and offering significant sums for the production of exclusive content. This opens up new opportunities for publishers around comedy, sport, lifestyle, and high-quality narrative series. In the United States, new platforms like Luminary and Stitcher Premium are trying to build a new business model based on premium subscriptions, while in Europe, we’re seeing the emergence of new services like Majelan and Sybel in France, or Podimo in Denmark. All these actors have the ambition to become a “Netflix of podcasting” as they invest in original audio content and try to bring podcasting to a wider public.

But the growing influence of tech companies and other intermediaries is bringing familiar challenges. Many publishers fear they are helping platforms build profitable businesses on the back of their content. Others worry they could lose their direct relationship with audiences, including first-party data, as platforms take the credit for content. Public broadcasters in particular are trying to develop their own destinations for audio content, and a number have started to publish first to their own platforms or are withholding content from third parties altogether.

Most publishers feel there’s still significant room for growth, with new voice-driven interfaces making it easier to access on-demand audio in the home and on the move. But the scale of the opportunity remains unclear, with revenue still relatively modest and increasing competition from platforms and independent producers. Podcasting is attracting younger audiences, but predominantly from the better-educated “latte-drinking” classes. Reaching more mainstream audiences will require a broader range of content and audio formats, better interfaces, and improved distribution. These changes are likely to take some time.

IN THE NEWSROOM:
— Women as a group are paid less than men.
— Collectively, employees of color are paid less than white men, even when controlling for age and job description. White women are paid about the median for their age.
— Women of color in the newsroom receive $30,000 less than white men — a gap of 35 percent when comparing median salaries.
— The pay disparity between men and women is most pronounced among journalists under the age of 40: When adjusting for similar age groups, which in most cases is a good stand-in for years in journalism, it becomes clear that the pay disparity between men and women exists almost exclusively among employees under the age of 40.
— Men receive a higher percentage of merit pay raises than women, despite accounting for a smaller proportion of the newsroom.
— The Post tends to give merit raises based on performance evaluation scores, but those who score the highest are overwhelmingly white. The Post is fairly consistent across races/ethnicities and genders at awarding raises to those who do well on performance evaluations.

On the business side, men and women were paid about the same but people of color made less than white people and “the disparity is even larger when adjusted for age, suggesting that employees of color in commercial are paid less than their white peers despite having more experience.

Data journalist Steven Rich led a team of Post journalists reviewing the data over the past four months, (29 are credited in the report) but the guild acknowledges its limitations:

Members of the Guild also met with representatives of Post management to review the findings and invited management to respond. The company declined to comment. If The Post disagrees with any of the Guild’s conclusions, we welcome the company to conduct and share a study of its own.

We must note that the ability to analyze pay disparities at The Post has been hindered by the company’s lack of specific data on the professional experience of its employees, who sometimes have built lengthy careers before joining The Post. The relative lack of diversity at The Post, particularly the relatively low numbers of black and Hispanic or Latino newsroom employees, also complicated our analysis because of the small sample sizes — but in itself demonstrates that the company must do better to recruit and retain a diverse staff.

Post management called the report “seriously flawed,” telling Poynter:

The Post is committed to paying employees fairly for the work they perform, and we believe that we do so, taking into account relevant factors like position, years of experience, and performance. It is regrettable that the Guild published a report on pay that does not appear to accurately account for these and other relevant factors, which have nothing to do with race or gender. In fact, the Guild concedes that its study’s “topline numbers such as median salary by gender or race and ethnicity cannot capture the entire story of pay at The Post.” We believe the report is seriously flawed. It is disappointing that the Guild chose to issue it — The Post told the Guild before its release that we had many questions about their methodology.

Sounds like an opportunity for the Post to release its own report, no? (I’ve reached out to them for comment and will update.)

The guild also shared more granular detail on the data, including interviews with unnamed employees. Steps are in place to combat the disparity, if people know about them; “it’s this continual uphill battle of just trying to get even,” said one employee who participated in a salary review after finding out they were $14,000 short of a peer employee. The report concludes with seven recommendations; here are the toplines:

1. The Post should strengthen and better formalize the salary review process.
2. The Post should allow direct managers to know how much their reports make.
3. The Post should ensure that pay disparities do not begin during the hiring process.
4. The Post also should re-evaluate the existing two-year intern program.
5. The Post must do more to ensure that the company reflects the diversity of American society.
6. To hold the company accountable in creating an equitable and diverse workplace, we also recommend that The Post hire an equity, diversity and inclusion chair/consultant and form a diversity committee.
7. The Post should hire a third-party consultant to conduct an annual pay study and share the results with Post employees, along with any recommended changes.

Media Twitter, of course, aired its views:

it's always been vocal about my feeling that if you cannot hold yourself accountable, it's difficult to hold others accountable.

putting my money where my mouth is. https://t.co/vod5OgNxTe

— Steven Rich (@dataeditor) November 6, 2019

This. The only way to get a raise at WaPo — especially as a woman/poc but *most* especially as a black woman — is to get an offer elsewhere or threaten to leave. Saw it way too many times. pic.twitter.com/1gRRUJ3RnM

— Victoria M. Walker (@vikkie) November 6, 2019

Median salaries at @washingtonpost:

White men: $117,452
Men of color: $101,575
White women: $99,640
Women of color: $86,511https://t.co/9H1hvpXGIj

— Michelle Ye Hee Lee (@myhlee) November 6, 2019

New pay study of Washington Post journalists by @PostGuild, with some ugly findings. This kind of information is one of the most important things your union can do for you. https://t.co/kgiDed9Rjy pic.twitter.com/nsxdNE2VQ7

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) November 6, 2019

Every reporter, writer, editor, hiring manager and the like should stop and carefully read the study of pay at the Washington Post and wonder if the same problems are happening in house too (spoiler: they are.)https://t.co/aok1i2b9qR

— Brittany Shepherd (@blrshepherd) November 6, 2019

this testimony in the @PostGuild pay study is probably a familiar story to many young women working in newsrooms https://t.co/rhCIGRapDc pic.twitter.com/sFTF0kMlld

— julia reinstein (@juliareinstein) November 6, 2019

This is what 507-pages of code and analysis look like.

The @PostGuild's and @dataeditor's magnum opus: https://t.co/C7sweiUF7f pic.twitter.com/7awRCsCVzL

— Alice Li (@byaliceli) November 6, 2019

This is why we ok boomer y'allhttps://t.co/4tSikadHYp pic.twitter.com/BSeRjJrhCj

— Kathryn Casteel (@kathryncasteel) November 6, 2019

The Washington Post just changed it’s parental leave policy: Now each parent gets 20 weeks — five months — of PAID leave. Yet another reason the Post is such a great place to work…

— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) October 17, 2019

.@washingtonpost just announced 20 weeks paid parental leave. That's 5 months. ANY parent is eligible for after the birth or adoption. Prior to this it was 4 paid weeks, and you had to work at the company a year before qualifying. Not anymore! (a thread)

— Libby Casey (@libcasey) October 17, 2019

The Post’s new policy matches The Wall Street Journal’s, which has been in effect since 2017. (What’s the situation at your news org? Tweet at me, my DMs are open.) Bloomberg’s policy is the most generous we could find, at 26 weeks, but it varies wildly, as you’ll see below.

Mandatory credit: The @WSJ policy for 20 weeks of paid parental leave implemented in 2017.

Seriously—Congrats to the Wapo newsroom! It's an important improvement in benefits for new moms and new dads … and new babies, and raises the standard for other media companies to match. https://t.co/FWbPjrXOPS

— Michael C. Bender (@MichaelCBender) October 17, 2019

The New York Times offers 16 weeks of paid parental leave for mothers who give birth vaginally, 18 weeks for mothers who give birth via C-section, and 10 weeks for non-birth parents. The Boston Globe offers 10 weeks to all new parents.

The Post’s policy does not apply to parents who are currently on parental leave right now — although a Post PR person said that if a parent is on leave as of January 1, 2020, their leave can be extended.

man i should've waited to have my kid next year https://t.co/qCRlkS1PuR

— pumpkin spice liz bruenig (@ebruenig) October 17, 2019

We’re collecting other news organizations’ parental leave policies and will update this post as we get them. (My DMs are open and you won’t be identified.)1 Here’s what we’ve got so far:

Advance: Birth mothers can use short-term disability for 6 fully paid weeks; nothing for fathers/non-birth parents.

The Atlantic: 12 paid weeks for all new parents.

Bloomberg: 26 paid weeks for primary caregivers (“24 weeks of fully paid parental leave, plus 10 transition days (one day off per week for 10 consecutive weeks) immediately following an employee’s return to work”)

Cox Media Group: 8 weeks paid maternity leave, 2 weeks paid paternity leave

The Daily Beast: 16 weeks for primary caregivers

The Dodo: 8 paid weeks for “primary” care providers, 4 weeks for secondary

Fast Company: 12 paid weeks for all new parents

The FT: 20 paid weeks for moms and up to 6 paid weeks for dads (globally; policies may be more generous in UK)

Gannett: 6 weeks of paid leave for any parent (“within the first 12 months following the birth, adoption, surrogacy or foster care placement of an employee’s child)”); birth mothers get an additional 6 weeks of paid short-term disability for vaginal births and 8 weeks for C-sections.

Gimlet: 6 months paid parental leave. (Gimlet is owned by Spotify.)

(The former) Gizmodo Media Group: 12 paid weeks for all new parents

The Intercept: Four months for all new parents

McClatchy: Zero. Employees can use saved sick time, birth moms can take short-term disability at 60 percent of pay.

Minneapolis Star Tribune: 8 weeks parental leave at 50 percent of pay.

NBC/MSNBC: 16 paid weeks for primary caregiver (may take up to an additional 10 weeks unpaid), 2 paid weeks for secondary caregiver (may take up to an additional 24 weeks unpaid)

NPR:

NPR offered four weeks until 2018, when it was doubled to eight. Should have had my kids later!

— Elise Hu (@elisewho) October 18, 2019

Slate: 8 paid weeks for all new parents

Talking Points Memo: 10 paid weeks for all new parents

Texas Tribune: 8 weeks paid family leave, and up to 16 weeks of job protection for those who take unpaid time; employees can use up all of their PTO to get 4 additional weeks of paid parental leave.

Tribune Publishing: Zero. Birth moms can use short-term disability.

Vox Media: 16 paid weeks for all new parents

1. U.S. parental leave laws are often a confusing mishmash of straight paid time off, short term disability at reduced or full pay, state-mandated leave in a handful of states, and so on. A company that offers four pay weeks of paid leave may also, for instance, offer 8 additional weeks of short-term disability at full or partial pay, bringing an employee’s total parental leave to twelve weeks. We’ve tried to be as specific as possible here and welcome clarifications if you have them. In addition, leave may not be offered to all employees of a company and may differ depending on how long you’ve worked there, and union and non-union employees in the same companies may have different policies. Yes, non-U.S. readers, it’s crazy, we know.

There’s the megamerger, and then there are the numbers: $1.8 billion, 11.5 percent interest, 5 years, $300 million, 18 percent…and many more.

Investors, industry observers and wags have picked through the pieces of the Gatehouse/Gannett megamerger this week, and obsessed over those numbers. All to the question: Will this deal work?

That’s the financial/operational question here, easier to prophesize than the democratic one: What will be the impact in the hundreds of communities that are used to having one major (if flagging) daily serve their basic news and information needs?

The two — financial success and journalistic capacity — should tie together, of course. How they do is one of the great mysteries of this merger. How much money exactly will be saved, and what exactly will it be spent on?

That’s where these big numbers drive the conversation, occupying all the oxygen in the room, and obviously caused great palpitations on Wall Street.

Gannett’s and Gatehouse’s (ticker symbol NEWM) share prices both stabilized somewhat on Thursday, after the latter took a 30-percent-plus dive after the merger announcement. Both companies’ shareholders — and the same top institutional shareholders own lots of both companies — continue to reckon with the reality of the deal.

That led to some apparently premature alarm that the deal would go quickly south, but it had appeared through this week that the investors who bought in as the price took a dive supported the deal and wouldn’t oppose seeing it completed. Among the big players: Leon Cooperman, chair of Omega Advisors, continues to increase his NEWM stake, as others have sold.

On Friday morning, though, this drama took a new turn.

The dealmakers face a new — though known — fear: Alden Global president Heath Freeman. On Friday morning, Alden, through its MNG Enterprises newspaper chain, filed with the SEC, announcing a 9.4 percent stake in NEWM. The stated reason for its large purchase: “The Reporting Persons are evaluating the terms of the Merger Agreement and believe that the consummation of the Merger may not be in the best interest of the Issuer’s shareholders.”

What might Alden — which saw its hostile bid for Gannett defeated in the spring — now do?

The filing hints at loose threat: “Accordingly, the Reporting Persons reserve the right to take certain actions with respect to the Merger including, but not limited to, undertaking to vote against or campaign against the Merger and to propose or suggest strategic alternatives other than the Merger.”

What’s Alden’s real play here? It’s likely more than the spurned Heath Freeman spitting in the soup of the megamerger.

Will he come back with a new all-cash offer, if this deal continues to be met with skepticism from investors, who drove down NEWM stock by more than 10 percent again on Friday? Is he just trying to force the hand of Softbank, the parent of NEWM manager Fortress, to invest, raising the share price, and profiting Alden in the short term? Does he sense that if this megamerger goes through, his MNG Enterprises will be left lonely on the sidelines of the Consolidation Games dance hall, unable to find a suitor?

Softbank may indeed be entering the fray and supporting the deal, word on the street says. Expect numerous other moves in this chess game, which could go for months. Remember, shareholders won’t vote on the deal until late in the year, pending regulatory approval, so the jockeying could well intensify.

Meanwhile, NEWM CEO Mike Reed will be doing everything he can to save the deal. Five days after the deal was announced, a consensus has evolved: He could have done a better job to sell the story of the business synergies of the deal — and to justify the huge, high-priced debt burden the megamergered New Gannett would take on.

The question, then again, of the moment: Is this the best future for these companies?

“Look, it’s the best deal we could get,” one insider told me this week. And that, in a nutshell, sums it up. This current deal is far from ideal for either company, or its shareholders, or its employees, or its readers. And for Gannett, it’s better than being captured by Freeman.

For Gatehouse, it’s the best available alternative as the company has hit a strategic wall, its $1.1 billion-fueled acquisition-heavy strategy and good dividend no longer wowing investors. Fortress Investment Group, the money and strategy behind Gatehouse’s gargantuan growth, saw its next opportunity. It seized it — and now the private equity company will continue to manage the big merged company for the next two years, through CEO Mike Reed, its key employee (more details on that arrangement below).

As the newsprint dust settles, let’s take a quick look at the numbers and a couple of other points that now populate the industry conversation.

The Numbers

$1.792 billion: That’s the immediate financing in this deal. Led by Apollo Global Management, consider this huge sum of money a “bridge loan,” say those involved in the deal. As a bridge, it’s a costly one, set at 11.5 percent interest. Significantly, there’s no penalty for paying off the five-year note early refinancing it.

That’s a key part of the financial logic here. Apollo supplies the massive financing of this deal at 3.5 times or so the companies’ earnings; that’s a deal that doesn’t come cheap, so 11.5 percent is the best rate Gatehouse could get to get the deal done now. One reason that bigger Gannett isn’t the acquirer: it didn’t have the juice to get the financing.

That means that for the next couple of years, the New Gannett will be driven to pay off as much of that debt as possible. If it can get the debt down to two times earnings, then it can refinance at a more palatable interest rate of 8 percent or less. (That’s what McClatchy is paying in its latest refinancing.)  That would save the company millions in annual costs.

Apollo is is no stranger to the newspaper industry, and is described by those who know it as the keenest follower of the trade. While in its 2015 failed bid to buy Digital First Media, it intended to launch an aggressive digital-first strategy, its role here is simpler: financier. With its senior position in the deal, it could come to own the New Gannett if it defaults. For now, though, it will just rake in short-term dollars.

The other link to remember: Apollo and Fortress Investment Group.

“Remember, lots of banks were in on the reviewing deal,” says one significant holder of Gannett shares. “And no one would finance it.  It took Apollo and that high rate to get the deal done.”

Another said, “Without Fortress and its influence on Wall Street with the money it spreads around, this deal wouldn’t have worked.”

That’s pivotal to understand in this megamerger and to remember as we contemplate a McClatchy/Tribune merger or others. It’s really tough to get financing for an industry in such structural decline.

$300 million: That’s the annual cost savings synergy number that CEO Mike Reed is aiming for, as he announced $275–300 million as a target. Subtract $100 million or so the first year, due to lots of severance costs in reducing business side headcount and buying out of duplicative vendor contracts. Reed has emphasized that the $300 million is “only” 7.5 percent of the combined companies’ expenses, a lesser percentage than other merged companies’ executives have claimed.

That’s the big key to this deal: massive savings in combining two big companies, which then buys time for the digital transition solutions.

The savings, most observers believe, are real. The question is where do these savings go? Think Let’s Make a Deal’s three doors:

• Debt repayment. A must, of course, with that added incentive of getting the principal down for a cost-saving refi.
• Dividend: New Media Investment knows it needs its dividend to keep shareholders happy.
• Reinvestment in the business.

For a company whose revenue is only about 25 percent digital, the massive heavy lifting of “digital transformation” lies ahead. Witness the expense of those who are farther along nationally, led by the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. Major reinvestment in both technology and talent have led the way. The new Gannett is much closer to the beginning of the digital transformation process than the end. That’s expensive.

So, the big question: With the major savings, especially after the first year (given the cost of getting those savings), how much money will go to each door? There’s already tension between the two companies on that question, as the deal proceeds with regulators, with Reed more focused on debt reduction and old Gannett on transition, say sources.

And the bigger question behind that: What’s the New Gannett’s theory of the case? What will the largest local news company need to do and be to be successful in the 2020s? Neither Gannett nor Gatehouse has offered any big vision of what that is, or could be, even fueled by new money. We know Heath Freeman’s theory: Local newspaper companies are a lost cause, so milk them ‘til the cows are dry.  What is the New Gannett’s theory?

Is there a plan to broadly embrace cutting of print days, as much of the industry models that idea? Is the combined digital marketing services business of New Gannett its primary commercial strategy? Can it make a bigger revenue stream out of Gatehouse’s industry-leading events business? Will the USA Today Network find stronger legs — in both digital ad revenue and shared national and investigative reporting — as Gatehouse properties are added to it?

We’ve heard no grand pronouncement about reinventing local news in the 2020s. If, say, The New York Times or Washington Post were the party bringing these two companies together and offering a grand turnaround future, we’d see a story that would capture imagination.  This story, one of economy, mainly registers shrugs.

18.5 percent: That’s how much print advertising was down, year over year, in this week’s announced second-quarter financial reporting at Gannett, with overall revenues down 9.9 percent. That number multiplies the difficulty of the math of this deal. If revenue were at least flattish, CEO Mike Reed could allocate those savings more easily through the three doors.  But it’s not.

The Monopoly board on which this strategy is being executed is shrinking as the game is played.  (Even Gatehouse, usually the best performer on a same-store basis the last couple of years was down 15.3 percent in print ads and 6.9 percent overall in the second quarter. McClatchy followed the same trend on Thursday, down 18.7 percent in print ads and 12.6 percent overall.)

In a deal that is all about cash flow, the merger partners face the fact that, on an operating basis, too much cash is flowing … backward.

263: That’s the total number of current daily operations now reported by the combined companies, but expect that number to change in 2020. First, the companies have to see what they must do to win the Department of Justice antitrust division’s approval of the deal. They’ve hired attorneys with DOJ experience to expedite the process and don’t expect big issues, given that they don’t own titles that go head-to-head in the same market. The antitrusters could take a wider view of regional price domination, but aren’t unexpected to.

At least for appearance’s sake, Gannett and Gatehouse might offer to sell some properties in areas that may seem monopolistic.

There’s one more good reason for the new Gannett to sell some properties: Cash, to repay that Apollo loan. The new Gannett will focus heavily on areas where it has great geographic domination — Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. After those, look for possible sales of properties that stand alone in their areas and may be prized by other publishers, who can themselves “cluster” newspapers together. That’s one arena in which the 2019 Consolidation Games may play on.

One thing Mike Reed will certainly do: Sell some of the surviving real estate sitting under Gannett properties. That, too, will bring quick cash.

Beyond the intriguing numbers, here are a few more questions:

Why the two-company structure? Observers of the Seussian corporate structure outlined in the merger announcement wonder why it’s being constructed that way. A set-up for further acquisitions, perhaps?

The reality is simpler. The new Gannett’s new corporate structure looks strikingly similar to New Media Investment Group/Gatehouse’s current one, and for a good reason: Fortress Investment Group, which bred the big Gatehouse, remains in the driver’s seat of the new Gannett. It’s no accident that NEWM shareholders retain 50.5 percent of the new company’s shares, with Gannett getting the minority 49.5 percent. That enables Fortress to maintain control of the board and the company.

Fortress, which brought Gatehouse through bankruptcy and assembled pools of acquisition capital in a market hungry to sell, gets to stay in charge of the new Gannett through 2021. Fortress, now owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank, negotiated through last weekend to get its due in this deal.

Back in 2013, Fortress began taking hold of Gatehouse Media, out of bankruptcy. Its management contract to run the new company through CEO Mike Reed, a Fortress employee who became its Grand Acquisitor, enabled it to run the table, spending more than a billion dollars buying dailies and weeklies from usually long-time newspaper owners, many of them families, increasingly desperate to get out of the business.

Then, Fortress, seeing the business run into a wall within the last 18 months, and unlikely to find new money to make smaller acquisitions, smelled money in the chaos of Gannett. Though it only owns 1.1 percent of Gatehouse, through this deal, it protects its position quite well.

In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Fortress’s continuing role is clarified. Essentially, the new Gannett, like the old Gatehouse, operates under the parent company — operated by Fortress, with Mike Reed, the new combined company’s CEO, still an employee of Fortress through the end of 2021.

“It’s extraordinarily odd,” said one significant investor in the company, speaking of the CEO of a public company being employed by a PE firm.

Fortress took in $21.8 million for its management of Gatehouse in 2018, and stands to make a similar sum for 2019. The merger agreement adjusts Fortress’s role and finally ends it in December 2021. We can see some of the financial/contractual adjustments in the filing, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture.

We can estimate that Fortress will earn at least its $20 million annually, if not more, for the next two years. In exchange for ending the agreement, Fortress gets 4,205,607 shares of the new Gannett stock, sellable at the end of 2021. Further, it is granted options to buy 3,163,264 shares of new Gannett stock. (“These options will have an exercise price of $15.50 and become exercisable upon the first trading day immediately following the first 20 consecutive trading day period in which the closing price of the Company Common Stock [on its principal U.S. national securities exchange] is at or above $20 per share [subject to adjustment], and also upon a change in control and certain other extraordinary events.”)

“Let no one ever say that you can’t make money in the newspaper business,” one industry veteran observed this week.

And, yes, this reality: It is a private equity company that will manage — through newspaper veteran executive Mike Reed — one-sixth of the U.S.’s daily newspapers for the next two years.

How much smaller will the New Gannett be in a year? By the end of 2020, it will be likely be significantly smaller. Consider that about $75 million could be paid out in severance funds, as headcount — the big cuttable cost center of newspaper companies — gets reduced.

As we’ve noted, most of those cuts will focus on the business and production part of the enterprise. Two corporate headquarters become one at Gannett’s McLean, Virginia, location. Every division and process will be under scrutiny as surviving managers aim to cut $300 million. Fewer printing presses, fewer middle managers, elimination of redundant technologies.

Speculation has begun, of course, about who and what will survive in this process. Some think that Gannett, even though it was acquired, may exert more staying power than one might expect.

Undoubtedly, it’s going to be complex. Gannett has invested multiples of millions more than Gatehouse over the years in systems of every kind, from content management to ad serving to subscriptions management — and has more middle managers supporting them, though those ranks have seen lots of cutting in recent years. Already, some key Gatehouse managers are rankled at the perception they may lose out.

The top two executives in this new company will set the tone for all the coming cuts, and CEO Mike Reed is no stranger to efficiency management. He’s got a new partner, Paul Bascobert. Gannett named Bascobert its new CEO at the same time it made the merger announcement. The company had been courting him for awhile, and Reed agreed to take him as a #2 as the deal solidified. Alison Engel, Gannett’s CFO, will move to that job at the merged company.

Bascobert isn’t the household name that Gannett had hinted at in the long months of its search after CEO Bob Dickey announced his retirement in December. But former associates describe him as a solid, experienced executive. At Dow Jones, one of his key positions was streamlining the company, and that talent will come in handy as the next year is consumed by the most judicious cutting the company can accomplish.

Second, he’s got experience in one key area of company growth: digital marketing services. Both companies have touted their services (LocaliQ for Gannett and Upcurve and ThriveHive for Gatehouse) as routes to a turnaround future. Bascobert led Yodle, an early market services independent that competed with ReachLocal and was later bought by Gannett.

Putting together those marketing services businesses will be complex but it’s clearly in Bascobert’s comfort zone.

The big name missing from the merger announcement: Kirk Davis. CEO of Gatehouse Media and the clear #2 to Reed, Davis is his boss’ long-time business partner. Many read the absence of his name in merger announcement as a sign he’s out, though that may be premature.