Online-only news still can’t stand on its own

Last week, the Copley family ended its 80-year ownership of the San Diego Union-Tribune, selling it to a private equity firm.

According to The Associated Press, the newspaper's chief executive, Gene Bell, told employees in January the Union-Tribune's advertising revenue had fallen 40 percent since 2006. Asked at a staff meeting this past week whether the newspaper was profitable, Bell said, "It depends on the week."

In Seattle on Tuesday, the venerable Post-Intelligencer delivered its last printed copy of the newspaper to the city's doorsteps. Today, a mere shadow of its former content, it is delivered via the Internet. The news organization's staff has been reduced from 165 to 20, including one photographer.

The Rocky Mountain News in Denver has shut down.

This follows both Detroit daily newspapers deciding to deliver printed papers to homes only three days a week, going online the other days of the week.

The Christian Science Monitor says it will print a weekly newsmagazine and otherwise go online-only.

The Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles times among other major daily newspapers, has filed bankruptcy.

A recent Time magazine article listed the 10 most endangered major newspapers in America, naming dailies in Philadelphia, Miami, Cleveland, Fort Worth, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, Detroit and Minneapolis.

In the midst of all this spilled ink and journalistic solipsism over the financial future of the news media comes the lengthy and sobering annual report from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, "The State of the New Media." (http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/index.htm)

It offers a big bat for those who like to pound on the news media like a hollow papier-maché piñata. In the past 10 years, the share of Americans who see the media as politically biased has risen as much as 15 points, to as high 60 percent in surveys.

"In early 2009 ..." the Pew report found, "only 8 percent of Americans told an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll they had a 'great deal' of confidence in the national news media while 18 percent said they had 'no confidence at all.' "

That'll sure help sell newspapers. I can't help but wonder if the attitude is due to a certain familiarity breeding contempt, as more media resources became more easily accessible online with no financial commitment.

On the other hand, while newspaper print circulation nationwide fell 4.6 percent for the six months prior to Sept. 30, 2008, online individual newspaper readers increased by 15.8 percent, and page views were up 25.2 percent, increasing the newspaper audience by about 8 percent overall.

But the frightening number was in newspaper advertising revenue. That was down 23 percent in the past two years. As a result, according to Pew, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is now gone, and 2009 isn't looking that bright.

Despite all those people reading the news free online, it is not translating into revenue, the study found.

"The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19 percent in the last two years; in 2008 alone traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27 percent," Pew reported. "Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue -- the model that financed journalism for the last century -- will be inadequate to do so in this one. Growing by a third annually just two years ago, online ad revenue to news websites now appears to be flattening; in newspapers it is declining."

So where do we go from here? Don't follow the lemmings over the cliff just yet. Pew looked at the online-only option and offered this analysis:

"In the current calculus, it does not make sense for newspapers to kill their print versions and go online-only. The Sunday paper and some late-in-the-week issues still are flush with ads, and print still commands premium ad pricing. Papers still make roughly 90 percent of their revenue from print and, although the numbers vary by paper, the cost of printing and delivering the printed newspaper averages 40 percent of costs. For now, it doesn't add up to sacrifice potentially 90 percent of revenues to save 40 percent of costs."

Hang on, dear readers. It is going to be a bumpy ride, and no one has a map to the future.

Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes about the role of the press and access to public information. He may be contacted at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@reviewjournal.com. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/mitchell.