HAS YOUR LOCAL NEWSPAPER DIED?

 

                              …Very few local papers print their own newspapers

 

The owners of the American Statesman don’t give a damn about local newspapers.

 

Many local newspapers have died.  Some still appear to be around, but when the paper is delivered, it has no life, no news, and barely a pulse.  The Austin, Texas, paper, American-Statesman is one of the hundreds of local journalism zombies that rely a bare number of local readers, who cling to a memory of what used to be and a flickering hope that, surely the thing won’t get worse. And then it does.

Our papers are getting worse at a time we desperately need them to get better.  They are no longer mediums of journalism, civic purpose, and a local identity.  Rather, they’ve been reduced to little more than profit syphons steadily piping local money to the handful of distant, high finance syndicates that have bought out our hometown journals.  The American Statesman, for example was swallowed up in 2019 by the nation-wide Gannett chain., where it joined more than 1,000 mass-produced “local” papers under the corporation’s  “USA Today Network” banner.  But even that reference is a deception, since it’s actually a product of SoftBank Group, the multibillion-dollar Japanese financial consortium that owns and controls Gannett.

SoftBank has no interest in Austin as a place, a community, or even as a newspaper market.  Nor does it care one bit about advancing the principles of journalism.  As aggressive as airline monopolists at charging more for less, SoftBank is in the profit business of extracting maximum short-term payouts.

This business model has rapidly become the standard for American newspapering.  Today, more than half of all U.S. dailies are in the grip of just 10 of these money syndicates.  Indeed, only three high-flying hedge funds, SoftBank, Alden Global Capital, and Chatham Asset Management, have captured your dailies in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Charlotte, Columbus, Des Moines, Detroit, El Paso, Fort Worth, Louisville, Miami, Milwaukee, Nashville, Oklahoma City, Orlando, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Jose and St Paul…and many more.  Equally important, these profiters are snatching up of weeklies meant to serve neighborhoods from coast to coast.

Far from serving your news needs, they’re strictly interested in diverting the papers’ income and assets into their private wealth funds, this “financialization” of journalism is a Wall Street euphemism for old-fashioned plundering, accomplished by disseminating editors, reporters, et all., closing bureaus, out-sourcing design and other core assets, shrinking the paper’s size and frequency  and standardizing and drastically jacking-up the paper’s price.

All of the  above not only remove wealth and jobs, basic information, and voices from our communities, but also transfer community power to a tiny circle of superrich speculators who don’t give a damn about newspapers, our towns, or us.

Copyright G. Ater 2022