'Local' essential ingredient to newspapers' success, but it's not the only important ingredient

A recent Seattle Times editorial presented a cogent narrative to explain the current state of the newspaper industry:

The 1980s and 1990s were periods of ungodly profit, and newspaper owners tended to be out-of-town, financially minded investors, “often rapacious to the point of injury,” the editorial said. Newspaper purchases were leveraged deals that left companies saddled with bank debt — typically paid for by “hacking away at journalism, content and service.” Already facing pressure from the Internet in the 2000s, when the bottom of the economy fell out, newspapers simply couldn’t manage.

The Times editorial closes optimistically, though.

“(W)e believe newspapers can support themselves once this recession is over, as long as they stay local: local news, local features, local entertainment, local opinion, local service and local ownership.”

It’s the repeated emphasis on “local” that caught my attention and that I wanted to throw open for discussion here, in part because I’m not sure it is as simple as all that. We in the industry talk a lot about the local franchise, but it’s not apparent that a local-only publication is a home run. Certainly, hyperlocal news Web sites haven’t figured out a business model, which I pointed out in an earlier blog post.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The depth and breadth of local coverage is largely dependent upon a newspaper’s manpower, particularly at small, lean publications the size of the Packet and Gazette. When the response to economic problems such as those we currently experience is to cut newsroom staff, it is inarguable that a newspaper’s capacity to serve its community is reduced, as well — perhaps not proportionately, but still reduced to some extent. Diminishing the quality of a product is no way to get ahead in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

So when the Times says it believes newspapers can rebound along with the economy so long as they emphasize the local, I agree, at least to the extent emphasizing the local means adding back at least some of the local reporting wherewithal the recession ate away.

Perhaps I read too much into the Times’ editorial, but the implied message seems to me to be that daily newspapers can simultaneously de-emphasize its package of state, national and international news. That, I think would be a mistake, despite surveys that indicate most people get their national news from television or the Internet.

It is possible I’ve simply become conditioned by years of working for The Island Packet, the readership of which tends to have more transplants, a higher level of education and a healthier appetite for wire copy than that of most newspapers. But I think newspapers will abandon at its own peril a one-stop-shopping approach for news from all points of the globe for several reasons:

• Some of the longest comment threads on this Web site are attached to stories of statewide or national scope. Ergo, you cannot conclude local readers are uninterested in issues that extend beyond their immediate geography.

• Many of the letters to the editor in our print edition are similarly focused.

• Just because news of this sort is available elsewhere doesn’t mean we should make readers go elsewhere to find it.

• Many of our critics harangue us for handling of non-local copy, which suggests an expectation that we will provide it in the first place.

I also am reminded of the example provided by Rush Limbaugh. Regardless of what you think about El-Rushbo’s politics, there is no denying he is both a juggernaut and a pioneer of the modern talk-radio genre. After more than two decades of success on the airwaves, it’s easy to forget the struggle Limbaugh had convincing station managers to let him conduct a show the way he wanted, which meant talking about national and international issues in an age when local AM talk radio was just that — almost entirely local in focus. Sacramento station KFBK gave Limbaugh some leeway back in 1984. National syndication and loads of imitators followed, and it’s hard to imagine the industry wouldn’t have been vastly different (and probably less profitable) had Limbaugh not received the chance to buck conventional wisdom.

I guess the relevance of that example depends upon how similar AM radio in the early 1980s is to newspapers of today. Certainly, some of the market forces are different, but I’d say the industries have quite a bit in common, too.

So, while I agree that there is a direct correlation between newspapers’ success and the quality of their local coverage, in my opinion, giving short shrift to non-local news is not a great idea. If you disagree, I’d love to hear why. Changing my mind, though, will require a cogent explanation of the amount of comment national stories receive on this site and the chiding we receive when readers believe we have not given them adequate play.

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