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.
Jul
16
When our turgid economy began to calm down, and real estate prices stopped soaring, I began to get this question when giving speeches:
“Is there going to be another bubble?”
No, I said, there won’t be, because the last bubble was caused by the sudden exit of Japanese investors at a time when they were driving the market by themselves. This time the market has lots of driving forces and we’re more likely to see a leveling off of prices and then a little settling back.
I won’t claim to be right just because I’m right so far, since future developments could increase the decline in home prices. Heck, maybe prices will fall so much that would-be first-time homebuyers can afford to buy again. That would be a great thing for some young couples. But it does appear that whatever happens, a bubble it will not be.
The new question is whether we’re just lagging the mainland, and whatever is happening in California now will happen here. Some people just assume this is so, and all they want to know is how many months or years it will take before we have the same unemployment rate as Fresno.
Hawaii’s economy does not LAG the mainland economy. It simply behaves differently, buffeted by several different forces:
- It is affected by prosperity in the markets that send us visitors, especially Japan, the West Coast, and Canada. Right now both Japanese and mainland visitor arrivals are down, and we’re still doing okay so far.
- It is affected by the military economy, which is managed through central planning and driven by global unrest. The more unrest, the better for this economic sector, and right now there is unrest to spare.
- It is affected by demographics, and like Florida and Arizona we have an aging population with a lot of transplant retirees who tend to act as a stabilizing influence on the economy.
The thing is, whatever happens to us, it won’t be “california, but later,” it will be something unique to Hawaii.
Probably something not as bad. Even California has regional economies, and the coastal cities that send us our visitors aren’t doing as badly as the inland towns where we never get much visitor traffic anyway.
I’m not trying to paper over the very real slowdown of the Hawaii economy, only encourage you not to get a case of nerves beyond what’s actually called for.
Jul
16
Daniel Akaka sits on the Senate Banking Committee and Tuesday he got to question Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.
“My concern,” said Sen. Akaka, “is to educate the people… and empower them in our financial system. Given the recent failures, I’m concerned by the increasing lack of trust that individuals have in the banking system.”
Bernanke agreed that there is a problem with people, including many immigrants, whom economists call the “unbanked.”
Yes, Akaka persisted, but what about working families exploited by unscrupulous lenders through payday loans?
“I think that competition is the best solution,” Bernanke said.
The courtly Akaka would never say so, but that is one dumb response.
The whole idea of free markets is that companies go where the profit is, but because there would be certain complications if all companies went into the arms trade, drugs and prostitution, we have rules.
Business people like to expound on how you shouldn’t have an excess of rules, but a few sensible rules are good for everyone including ethical business people. Sensible regulation of payday services is a no-brainer.
Really, it has been alarming lately, and not just to “the unbanked,” how clueless are the people who are supposed to be regulating our financial systems. I know the systems are complicated, but there is nothing complicated about cracking down on predatory lending.
There’s always a paper trail, you see.
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