Jul
17
The Honolulu Advertiser announced Wednesday it is cutting 54 of its 576 staff positions. Affected employees will be told by their supervisors.
You can read about it here for free, and that’s part of the problem, but only part. Honolulu newspapers face the same issues faced by newspapers across the nation, plus some special ones unique to Hawaii.
Newspapers across America have been cutting staff positions — the Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced 184 job cuts Wednesday — as they lose ad revenue to online media.
Gannett Corp. posted a $233 million quarterly profit Wednesday that was down 36% from the same time last year (18% if you dial out one-time profits from selling some newspapers last year) and said its revenue was down 10% from $1.9 billion to $1.7 billion on ad revenues down 8% and classified revenues down 19%. Gannett owns the Advertiser.
In addition to having to deal with that national trend, the Advertiser exists in a rare situation — one of the nation’s last two-newspaper markets. A Canadian media magnate who likes to come to Hawaii to sail bought the Star-Bulletin and is keeping it going at a loss, assisted by decent revenues at affiliated properties, especially MidWeek. So newspaper ad revenues in Honolulu are not a monopoly.
In addition to that, Honolulu has Pacific Business News, Honolulu magazine, Honolulu Business, and other publications, as well as five television stations that have full-fledged local newscasts. This is a lot of ad choices for a market this size. It mitigates against higher ad rates.
The Hawaii Newspaper and Printing Trades Council, which has been negotiating with the Advertiser for more than a year since the expiration of its last contract, got a pre-echo of all this Tuesday when the newspaper, saying it needed some economic relief, proposed sweeping contract givebacks including longer hours, flexible job descriptions, loss of unused sick leave, the prospect of freezing pensions, lower wages for new hires, and broad freedom to eliminate jobs through outsourcing.
One interesting proposal for outsiders watching all this: the Advertiser wants to be able to order writers to take pictures, photographers to write, and everybody to shoot video.
The all-news station in Washington, D.C., for which I worked before moving here, and for which I still file (my third job!), has reporters who shoot video for its website. A RADIO station, mind you.
The history of news media is that each new medium gains ascendancy and then the older ones find permanent niches. They never die completely (cunieform excepted) but shrink to a size they can sustain by doing what they do really well.
When TV came along, radio imploded. No longer did their commercial revenues support live dramas with a half dozen actors and a booth announcer and three or four people in the control room. No longer did a music host have his own engineer controlling the volume and another one cueing up records. Within a few years the typical radio station had a single person on duty and on the air at any given time, doing everything. Sometimes a computer does it. But radio survived. Its audience even supports a few limited big-staff operations, including morning zoo shows and NPR.
TV itself has been under pressure since the advent of cable, which took an audience that had previously been divided into three or four choices and scattered it among 100 channels. Local TV stations now have unmanned cameras that take their directions from one guy at a computer.
Newspapers were able to postpone such a day of reckoning for many years, first by reaping the savings of simpler, faster equipment for putting the paper together, and then by the market monopolies created when afternoon traffic jams and evening newscasts killed the afternoon newspapers.
Even now they probably won’t go through quite as much of a catharsis as, say, radio did, because newspapers still do a great deal of original reporting that has value. A newspaper is still a more effective way to browse through stories than most Internet sites. It’s great that we can google for anything we like, but browsing has value, too.
The Star-Bulletin not long ago tried to look more like a Web page. That wasn’t wise. A newspaper can never out webpage a webpage. But it can be a better newspaper, a better digest, a better sampler.
Comments
Leave a Reply
Posts
