A Reminder of the Need for Local News: The Shrinking Tribune (Tam Moore)
Without successful local media companies, there won’t be folks on the ground asking the right questions and digging into the public record.
My last Saturday local newspaper came on July 31. I didn’t cancel my subscription to the Mail Tribune (MT), since 1989 the seven-day-a-week newspaper for Medford, Oregon.
The Tribune, like most of Oregon’s daily newspapers and a host of dailies across the country, went hybrid as of August 1: A combination of four print editions weekly and daily Internet posting to digital editions.
Oregon probably has just six remaining daily newspapers—and one of them, the largest in circulation The Oregonian, does home delivery only four days a week. One of the dailies I used to read regularly is all digital now. Things are changing rapidly; I can’t be sure of the distribution strategies of Oregon’s papers beyond a quick web search.
Rosebud Media, the publishers of the MT, haven’t told me how my pre-paid MT subscription – now in its 54th year—will prorate the loss of three papers a week. I bet things are tight at Rosebud, which also publishes the smaller Ashland Tidings.
Some numbers tell the story of the stiff winds facing Rosebud and similarly situated publishers, without even getting into “hits” on Internet sites.
When I moved here in 1967, as a junior executive with a television, radio and cable TV outfit, the MT circulation was about 29,000 households. It would soon grow to more than 30,000 and the six-day-a-week Tribune expanded to publishing a Saturday paper in 1989—then under ownership of the Ottaway Newspapers.
When I checked circulation data after reading my last Saturday paper, The Tribune reported delivery to 17,138 subscribers. That’s in a county with 88,241 households according to the latest Oregon population estimates, and a two-state Medford Designated Marketing area with a population of 394,810 people living in 184,570 households. In other words, a sliver of the community currently subscribes to a common source of news. That’s a problem—both in terms of business and civics: advertisers need penetration of a market to make ad buys worthwhile; governments and community groups need a way to reach citizens.
We journalists—I’ve been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists since 1954—have had trouble with transitions in news delivery over recent decades. TV and radio news, where I spent the first half of my career, were tough on newspapers. Then came the Internet in the 1990s and stories originating with on-the ground professional reporters were popping up for free as Google and other search engines dug into the fast-multiplying digital files. Traditional media couldn’t figure out how to monetize the content they produced.
To add to the pressures on traditional media, the proliferation of opinion commentators on cable news and social media news aggregators gave readers more sources for information—and viewpoints—than most outlets could compete against. Pew Research Center 2020 data show “explosive audience growth” for cable news channels in the presidential election year—Fox News’ average audience increased by 61 percent, CNN’s by 72 percent, while local television news audiences gained just 4 percent.
As a result of these pressures, the business foundations of traditional media have crumbled. Meanwhile, advertisers are moving to other news sources. Newspaper advertising revenue fell off in 2020, Pew reports, to the extent that paid subscriptions were bringing in more money than advertising sales. Political advertising on local TV stations, on the other hand, topped $2 billion nationally among five major publicly-held local TV station groups. Digital advertising—those ads which pop-up while you are on the Internet, billed almost $250 billion in 2020, with $102.6 billion of ads on smartphones and other mobile devices.
All of this should worry those of us concerned about a functioning democracy. Voters need information when they go to the ballot box. Government at all levels, from special districts to the Congress of the United States, needs to hear from the governed in a timely way. It takes reporters and editors to gather the news—to tell us what the government is considering, so we can make our views known to the decision-makers. Without successful local media companies, there won’t be folks on the ground asking the right questions and digging into the public record.
The problem is beyond a lack of a Saturday paper. Collectively we need to figure out a successful business model for collecting and sharing local and regional news.
Tam Moore is a retired journalist, and former Jackson County Commissioner. He was born in Corvallis, 1934 and is a graduate of Oregon State.
I'd say the larger problem with journalism today, especially in BLUE Oregon, is a growing lack of objective reporting often seeded by journalism schools that lack viewpoint diversity among the faculty and prepare students to be activists not reporters. Critical thinking is a lost art today and newspapers like The Mail Tribune refuse to engage in a serious discussion about the need for less bias in the selection, framing, and anchoring of information being presented to the public. Promoting narratives has replaced fact-based reporting of *multiple* perspectives, with editors unable to discern that difference often due to deeply embedded confirmation bias. {Or what cognitive psychologists now refer to as "my side bias" driven by "motivated reasoning".}
This would be worth exploring. Yet, for example, the owner of Rosebud — which publishes the Mail Tribune / Ashland Tidings} refuse to engage in a *science-based* evaluation and analysis that could significantly improve the quality of public discourse and begin to restore confidence in journalism as an objective source of information that is a valuable contributor to "sense making."