Papers Face Cost, Quality Challenges
While the nation’s newspapers face the challenges of rising costs for newsprint and declining readership, editors say they must maintain quality and stay in touch with their readers.
More than 600 people gathered for the 72nd annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the nation’s oldest organization of newspaper editors.
The key issue at the conference is the cost of newsprint, said Gregory Favre, president of ASNE and executive editor of The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee.
“I hope we don’t react in a way that cuts the quality of what we do, and we maintain that for our readers and for the good of our future. And that means protecting our space, protecting our human resources,” Favre said.
Some of the nation’s 1,600 daily newspapers have reduced the space they devote to news stories, hiked prices and cut or frozen staffs to respond to the rising costs. A panel Thursday was devoted to “The Crunch of ‘95: Just a Bad Year or the New Reality?”
Panelists were generally optimistic that newsprint prices will drop.
While still very profitable, the industry is in its fifth year of belttightening, and that’s likely to continue for another year or two, said industry analyst John Morton of Morton Research.
Still, most challenges will not be on the cost side, said Joel Kramer, publisher and president of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.
“The problems come from the increasing competition for the information dollar and the entertainment dollar newspapers go after,” Kramer said.
“I think that real leaders in the journalism business have to be committed to solving … three problems at the same time: How do we fulfill our public service values, how do we meet our customers’ needs and how do we get money to keep capital invested,” Kramer said.
Executives said they also face many other challenges as telephone, cable and online services join the information business.
“It seems in the newspaper industry that there’s always some crisis of some sort, some economic crisis of some sort. And so while we have to deal with that, we can’t let that drive us,” said Judy Bolch, managing editor for staff of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.
Newspapers also must improve their relationships with their communities, said Christopher Peck, editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., and chairman of the ASNE ethics committee.
“Maybe you ought to spend more time on what really affects people locally, and that the only time you run stuff that’s national is if you can say, ‘How does it touch me?’ People don’t understand the connection between the national events and their own lives,” Peck said.
Reports released at the conference explore the role newspapers will play in the new media age and offer suggestions on getting more readers.
A study by The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University found that TV network news coverage is comparable to newspapers and better on some top stories.
A poll released Wednesday by the Times Mirror Center for The People and The Press found that only 45 percent of American adults said they read a newspaper in the past day, down from 58 percent the year before.
“I think that’s not an issue solely for the newspaper industry. It’s one for the nation, too, because it is so connected to literacy and the ability to participate in a democracy,” said Richard Oppel, Washington bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and a member of the ASNE board of directors.
“So I think we’re concerned not just as newspaper editors but as citizens that there continue to be some public conversation that provides cohesion to all of us, and newspapers have always had a central role in that,” Oppel said.