Print newspapers are going away. Not all at the same pace, but in time they’ll all meet the same end.
One might have expected the Journal Sentinel to cease print publication by 2020 or so, but Gannett’s decision to buy the J-S (and the rest of the print papers in the Journal Media Group) is a sign of how bad conditions are for print:
Gannett Co. Inc. said Wednesday it plans to buy Journal Media Group — the parent company of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel — for about $280 million in cash.The deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2016 if it receives regulatory and shareholder approval, adds Wisconsin’s biggest newspaper to Gannett, which already owns newspapers in Green Bay, the Fox Valley and other important markets in the state….
The agreement is part of an era of further consolidation in the U.S. newspaper industry, as newly pure-play newspaper companies take steps to meet the competitive threat of scaled digital news and advertising businesses, the companies said in a statement.When the deal is completed, Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star, will be in 116 U.S. markets and have a digital audience of more than 100 million unique visitors each month.
See, Gannett to buy Journal Media Group, parent of Journal Sentinel, for $280 million @ JSOnline.
A few remarks:
1. Gannett earlier split its print publications from its broadcast ones, just as Journal Communications did (with the broadcast properties going to Scripps, and additional print ones coming from Scripps to the Journal Media Group). What’s left is for Gannett print to buy as many newspapers as possible to keep going.
That’s not a sign of strength, it’s desperation for as many organ donors as Gannett can find.
2. Gannett won’t care about left-right conflicts in Milwaukee or elsewhere; their publications are safe, middle-of-the-road sedatives for undemanding readers. The battle between conservatives and liberals for the Journal Sentinel‘s heart and soul will end; Gannett papers have neither.
In a short time, no one will care about what the Gannett-owned Journal Sentinel thinks or feels about anything.
3. Gannett doesn’t have a local perspective: it’s a national enterprise with little regard to local issues.
4. If the Journal Media Group couldn’t stand on its own, local chains will fare no better.
5. Local print everywhere in Wisconsin – including near Whitewater – is already mediocre, and often laughably so.
When policymakers and politicians tailor their arguments to receptive reporters at the Gazette, Daily Union, or Register, they’re tailoring their work to an adolescent’s level of understanding and composition. Supportive stories in these publications are mostly unread, but worse, those stories lull politicians into a dull complacency.
6. Each day, I hand-curate posts from Wisconsin’s leading bloggers at Daily Wisconsin, and the work of those bloggers is the equal in quality and reasoning with the best reporters at the Journal Sentinel or State Journal. I learn a lot from reading these other bloggers; their work has been enriching.
The work of those same bloggers is markedly superior in composition and reasoning to anything written at the Gazette, Daily Union, or Register. It’s not even close, really.
So when local politicians, bureaucrats, and town squires play to the level of those local papers, they’re playing to a substandard level, below the quality of reasoning and composition found elsewhere in our state or country.
They could try harder, surely, but it’s easier for them (and perhaps more satisfying to their pride) to do poor work and get a fawning local headline than to do good work and meet a proper standard.
These men are not less intelligent; instead they’re less practiced, and less practiced in a competitive environment. They’ve simply atrophied through complacency, indolence, and self-regard.
That makes all the difference.
The purchase of the Journal Sentinel is one more sign that print is doomed, that those who have relied on print (especially small-town print) have relied in vain, and that the future holds promise only for those who have tried – who have at least tried – to reach a more competitive standard.
Now that Gannett has bought the Journal-Sentinel from Scripps, who bought it in April. I wonder what the back-story is on that? 6 months doesn’t qualify as a long-term investment on Scripps part. Considering the size of the deal ($280M), they must have been working on selling the J-S print empire from the moment that they bought it. Was Scripps just a straw-purchaser for Gannett?
Will Gannett continue the tradition at the J-S of being right-wing shills for the swells of Waukesha county? Gannett is known primarily for owning bland, content-free, unctuous “life-style” rags like USA Today. Sort of the Miller Lites of the dead-tree fish-wrapper biz.
Will Scripps drop the other shoe and sell WTMJ or turn them into a smooth-jazz station, now? Are there beads of sweat on Charlie Sykes brow? One wonders :>}
Thanks much for your comments. All intriguing questions. I agree that the earlier Scripps deal now looks like a straw-purchaser deal; the dust hadn’t even settled before this Gannett deal landed.
The future surely isn’t working out the way Sykes must have imagined it. His broadcast position is less secure with out-of-state ownership, and his Right Wisconsin website is an ill-conceived idea. Collecting conservative bloggers at a subscription-based site reaches only the already-converted; the whole point of blogging should be accessibility for any reader, however often he or she wishes to visit.
The last place a blogger should want to be is on the other side of a paywall.
It will be interesting to see how state politics coverage fares under Gannett. They are not known for making waves.
Bice, and occasionally others, have done some decent journalism on occasion at the J-S. I suspect that is now history. What is also likely history is the sheltered workshop gig for Christian Schneider on the op-ed page.
The shallow nature of political coverage by the J-S (and also the WSJ) was full-Monty exposed by the recent black-hole level of implosion by Walker on the national stage. Walker went from owning the world to support measured in single-digit parts-per-thousand in the space of 60 days, once the national press got hold of him. Walker didn’t change during those 60 days. He just got looked at by eyes that didn’t owe their living to support from the Bradley Foundation.
These days, the best political reporting in Wisco-World comes from alt-weeklies like Urban Milwaukee and the Shepard Express and independent operations with first-rate reporters like the Wi Center for Investigative Journalism.
RE: Sykes
I have also wondered about the paywall at Right Wisconsin. WisOpinion often cites them, but I have no interest in purchasing bilge from Charlie, so I don’t sign up. Charlie is clearly only interested in preaching to the already converted, but isn’t that the case with most all right-wing media? The bubble is real and the whole alternate-reality agit-prop nature of the epistemically closed right-wing info-tainment complex is pretty easy to see from outside of the bubble. Not so easy to see from the inside, however…
RW is just another method to monetize bullshit. Charlie is not interested in converts. He has all that he needs.
That seems spot-on about Bice (who has done good work) and Schneider (who’s doing someone else’s work, so to speak).
That’s a powerful point about how Walker’s weak campaign exposed huge gaps in prior, fawning Wisconsin coverage of Walker (and created a false image of him as a strong, formidable national contender). It’s hard to mourn the demise of a press than did so little, for so long, to the benefit only of a few, and at the expense of so many Wisconsinites.
Of Urban Milwaukee and Shepherd Express, I enjoy both, and SE is close to the last publication that I still read in newsprint. Having grown up in a newspaper-loving household, there’s still something enjoyable about turning that those pages. Not a week that goes by that I don’t pick it up.
That’s true about RW, and about so much cocooning, that tendency to read only within one’s preferences. It’s ruinous to good work, where the goal of reading is to read widely. It is a significantly greater problem on the contemporary right, being about as orthodox as they could be. I’m libertarian (from an old, ‘movement’ family), but read of the left and right as much as I read anything traditionally libertarian.