This essay is adapted from a speech by Tampa Bay Times Chairman and CEO Paul Tash to the Metro Production Conference, a consortium representing 76 newspapers and their suppliers from five countries. The essay originally appeared in the Tampa Bay Times and is being republished with permission.Â
Today being a Sunday, I offer my own confession of faith.
I believe in newspapers.
And by newspapers, I mean particularly those physical objects produced in huge quantity through some nearly magical process in the middle of the night and delivered before daybreak to millions of American homes and businesses where they are eagerly received.
I take nothing away from our websites, or our new apps for smartphones, or our electronic newsletters, or the videos we produce, or from the social media that connects people far and wide with the good work we are doing.
They have expanded our reach and capacities far beyond what anyone could have imagined and represent a vital part of our business and a steadily greater share of our future.
But we should also be clear-eyed about our electronic endeavors. At most American newspapers, they draw heavily upon the resources — financial, human and journalistic — of the business that our smug critics like to deride as “mature,” or “legacy,” or “dying.”
“Nobody reads newspapers anymore.” You hear that line so often that even some of our most loyal fans start to feel a little sheepish that they still want the ink-on-paper version of what we do. “I know I’m in the minority,” they sometimes tell me.
Except they are not in the minority, not by a long shot. According to the Pew Research Center and its annual report on the news media, more than half of all newspaper readers rely entirely on the printed version. And more than 80 percent of newspaper consumers have print as part of their mix.
Anybody who says “nobody reads newspapers anymore” has never spent a Sunday morning in a circulation phone room after a bad storm, or a breakdown in the pressroom, or a big college football game that went into overtime.
I believe in newspapers for their power to connect merchants with customers. Here in the Tampa Bay area, the No. 1 Ford dealer sells as many vehicles as the next three Ford dealers put together. His secret? I am sure he has several. Here’s one: He buys full pages of advertising in the local newspapers every day.
One of our best advertising customers is Publix Super Markets, but a few years ago, Publix decided to stop putting $5-off coupons on sticky notes plastered on the front page of the newspaper. The problem? Not that the ads weren’t working, but that they were working too well — with much higher redemption rates than Publix had bargained for.
So, I believe in newspapers.
Most of all, I believe in newspapers as a force for social good. For all the economic strain upon us, newspapers still break more ground, reveal more scandals and right more wrongs than any other branch of the news media.
If not for us, the world would be a different, darker place.
How do I know? For nine years, I had the high privilege of serving on the board of the Pulitzer Prizes. For two days every April, about 18 of us would gather at Columbia University in New York, reviewing some of America’s best journalism and deciding what deserved its highest prize. The debates were exquisite, and the decisions were often excruciating because so much work was worthy.
And every year, I would leave that room with two reactions.
First, it is really, really hard to win a Pulitzer Prize. I joined the board in 2006, the high water mark in American newspaper advertising, and in the next nine years, newspaper revenues fell steadily and sometimes steeply. In the year I became chairman of the Pulitzers, four of the prizes went to journalists at companies that had been through bankruptcy. And yet, the quality of the finalists never declined.
Here’s the second reaction I would always carry from that meeting: Thank God for newspapers. Frankly, it is hard to imagine any other branch of the news media taking up the kind of difficult, expensive and painstaking work that newspapers are still willing to do.
There’s no such thing as a bad Pulitzer Prize, but the best one is the gold medal for Public Service. As usual, there were three finalists this year.
One was the Boston Globe, for an expose showing how landlords with good political connections were packing college students into substandard and unsafe housing, and how both college and city officials in Boston were turning a blind eye to the danger. One student at Boston University died in a fire just weeks before she was to graduate.
Another Pulitzer finalist was the Wall Street Journal, for an extraordinary series about how a medical device commonly used during hysterectomies could actually increase the risk of cancer and death for women, by sending malignant cells to other places in the abdomen, like spreading the seeds of a deadly crop.
Neither of those finalists won the Pulitzer Prize.
Instead, the gold medal for public service went to the Post and Courier in Charleston, for revealing — and explaining why — South Carolina has the highest rate in the country of women killed by their husbands and boyfriends. In South Carolina, it turns out, you can go to jail longer for beating your dog than for beating your wife.
When it comes to covering a community, there typically is no more important voice than the local newspaper. This year, the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting went to the Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., circulation 70,000.
Reporters at the Breeze uncovered a scandal in a small local school district, which was paying its superintendent more than $600,000 a year — more than the superintendent of the Los Angeles public schools. The school district also loaned the superintendent $910,000 at 2 percent interest so he could buy a house, while he was going through his second bankruptcy.
If not for the Daily Breeze, who would tell that story?
The Pulitzers are open primarily to newspapers, but at Harvard University, the Goldsmith Prizes for investigative reporting are open to all comers. This year, there were more than 100 entries from television, radio, magazines — and newspapers.
The winner was the Miami Herald, for showing how state child welfare officials were leaving children with parents that the state knew — knew — were unfit, rather than remove the children to state custody. That policy was wrapped in the warm and fuzzy language of keeping families together, but the Heraldshowed that it was cheaper for the state to leave the kids with their parents.
The Herald found 477 children who died after child welfare officials had at least one encounter with their families. Seventy percent of the children were just 2 or younger, as the Herald said, “too young to walk, talk, cry out for help, run away or defend themselves.” One little girl was killed by her mother’s pet python.
If not for the Miami Herald, who tells her story?
Make no mistake, our newspaper business is harder than it used to be. Much harder.
Over the last decade, our economics have been upended by the worst financial crisis in our lifetimes, plus the relentless competition for advertising, especially on the Internet. Retail merchants that have been mainstays of newspaper ad columns now find their own businesses tremendously disrupted, first by Walmart and then by Amazon.
How much have things changed? Consider this:
In 1981, the owner of the Chicago Tribune newspaper bought the Chicago Cubs baseball team. In 2013, the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team bought the Boston Globe newspaper.
Inside the newspaper business, we know the pain of this last decade all too well. The casualties include some careers, and some of our confidence about the future.
Remember that Pulitzer Prize for the Daily Breeze in California, for revealing how the local school superintendent was enriching himself at the expense of the taxpayers? The lead reporter on those stories left the newspaper for a job in public relations, with better pay and better hours.
From beyond the newspaper business, some of our critics and rivals chortle at our discomfort. They claim our business struggles show that our day has passed, that we are old news.
Those people are confused. Difficulty is one question. Value is a different matter entirely.
Just because something is difficult, does not make it irrelevant. To the contrary, nothing that is really important is ever really easy.
I believe in newspapers.
Without them, another little girl dies. Another wife gets a beating. Another greedy public official gorges at the public trough. Another woman gets a hysterectomy that could kill her. More college kids — maybe some of your kids — are crammed into flophouses and firetraps.
I believe in newspapers because I see nothing on the horizon that could begin to fill the void that we would leave.
The stakes are high. The challenges are steep.
Our customers are counting on us. Our communities are counting on us. Our country is counting on us — to persevere and to prevail.
