A few years back, I picked up a book titled “The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Versus the Gannett Empire,” by Richard McCord.
I was in the newspaper business at the time, more than halfway through my 31 years as a writer and editor with the South Bend Tribune.
I was interested in the book because I had purchased shares in the massive newspaper conglomerate for my son’s college fund. Gannett was a steady growth stock that paid good dividends. It owned dozens of small newspapers but also had started a nationwide paper, USA Today, in 1982 that we all laughed about.
USA Today was like cotton candy. It fed a craving but had no nutritional value. Its news coverage depended on four-paragraph stories that gave some basic facts but didn’t even try to help readers understand anything. The paper provided words that masqueraded as news stories.
We didn’t see USA Today as any sort of threat to our Tribune. We knew our readers. They had huge appetites for news. There’s no way USA Today would cover town board meetings in Osceola or car burglaries in Cassopolis. And they certainly wouldn’t send a writer and photographer to a dozen or more area high school football games every Friday night like we did.
McCord’s book, published in 1996, was based on his battles to save local papers from Gannett in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. His main message? Gannett didn’t care about news or about communities. It was just a money machine.
This was the Gannett method, as described by McCord. The company would select a two-newspaper town where one of the papers was teetering on collapse. Gannett would buy out the weaker operation because it was cheaper.
Then Gannett would bring in its huge war machine to flatten the better paper. The cavalry would be good journalists conscripted from its other sites. Almost instantly, with a beefed-up staff, the new Gannett property became the newspaper with the best and deepest news coverage in town.
Gannett had a deep pool of cash from its other properties and could absorb temporary losses, so it would lower its circulation rates — in some cases delivering to all residents for free — to steal subscribers from the better paper. For the third wave, once it had its paper in everyone’s hands, Gannett would lower advertising rates to almost nothing, capturing its competitor’s loyal businesses.
Beaten in every way, the noble hometown paper would have to surrender and shut down its presses. Then as the only newspaper in town, Gannett could cut back on its news coverage, raise its circulation rates, and hike its advertising rates far above what they once were. And, of course, count its money.
Cities that previously had two battling newspapers were left with a stingy little rag whose owners never visited. Its profits would go into the pool that was used to ruin other small communities.
In later years, Gannett didn’t have to work nearly as hard to add to its empire. Through greed and ignorant pride, without any interference from Gannett, newspapers nationwide had brought themselves to the brink of ruin.
In many cities – South Bend included – the papers had been nurtured by sincere community boosters since the 1920s. Ink ran through the veins of those titans of journalism.
Their message of stewardship was passed in clear directives to the second generation. However, when Grandpa was buried and a third generation took charge, the passion wasn’t the same. If there was a blip in the budget, it was OK to cut back on news coverage. It wasn’t much different from stocking employee washrooms with generic toilet paper. Go cheap. This was a business after all.
National newspaper circulation had peaked in 1985 at an estimate of 62,766,000 daily purchasers. By 2020, circulation was 24,299,333. There are a lot of reasons, including the proliferation of home computers with access to free news-like information online. This could have been a huge opportunity for innovative leaders. But in newsrooms throughout America, the penny counters chose to cut back on costs instead of panning for gold on the internet.
Threadbare newspaper owners were exuberant when Gannett or Gatehouse or another chain showed up with a small bag of buyout cash. When it finally happened in South Bend in 2019, reporters here likely had not been to an Osceola Town Board meeting for 20 or 30 years and readers would see most football results only if high school coaches called them in.
Sad to say, it wasn’t just the newspaper industry that gave up on local news. Television and radio stations surrendered to conglomerates to such an extent that almost everything we think of as news – what we read, watch, and hear – is under the control of people outside our communities.
Increasingly, these conglomerates are run by people whose goals are far from what we traditionally wanted for ourselves. Gone is the hallowed commitment to fairness and accuracy. Where old-time journalists believed a fully informed public was the best guarantee for a healthy democracy, the billionaires know that their interests are served best if we are weak, ignorant, angry, and scared.
Now more than ever, there is a need for great journalism and great journalists. During the 20th century’s world wars, the health crises, and the tumult of the Sixties, whenever rumors spread and panic started to set in, millions of people opened their locally printed newspapers. Fortified with truths that were accepted by their friends and neighbors, they could band together and work toward solutions.
Nowadays we can’t even agree on who the president of the United States is.
My wife and I still subscribe to the Tribune, whose circulation has fallen from about 120,000 in the 1990s to somewhere closer to 20,000. Today, I scanned the three locally written news stories and the obituaries before I worked on the Sudoku puzzle.
While I was typing this, I heard sirens outside my window as police cars, firetrucks and maybe an ambulance sped into the dark up Ironwood. I will bet a monthly Tribune pension check that I won’t find out what happened by reading my newspaper or watching TV.
Something bad had happened. Maybe someone died. My newspaper used to tell me, but it doesn’t anymore. The owners don’t even know or care where Ironwood is.