This long comment came in from well-known columnist and longtime reporter, Bob Jones:
I suppose that as a believer in diversity of journalism I’m expected to oppose a proposition to close the Star-Bulletin and leave us as a one paper town.
I’m not there. In principle, yes. The reality is that news has become a business just like selling a car. It’s not a “calling” as it was when I entered it in 1955.
Then, rich individuals owned newspapers. I worked for some of them: Nelson Poynter of the St. Petersburg Times, Barry Bingham of the Lousville Courier-Journal, and Thurston Twigg-Smith of the Honolulu Advertiser.
In most of those cases, family inheritors wanted the money, not the newspapers. My hero was Barry Bingham. He used his money to staff a Washington bureau, fund a national religion and national education reporter, have AP, UP, Reuters and Izvestia as our wire services; hired me from Paris, a reporter from India, and another from Tokyo to beef up his local staff.
The Advertiser staffed Vietnam during that war with me, and then the woman I’d eventually marry, Denby Fawcett. No other newspaper of that size had two people covering the war.
Cec Heftel of KGMB financed me and cameraman Jim Sturdevant to go to Vietnam to cover the 25th Infantry Division in combat. That was not cheap!
Many years ago I worked for Marion Rospach of the Overseas Weekly, based in Frankfurt. She financed a bureau that I ran in Munich and then Paris, and another run by a staffer in London. Eventually, she financed a Saigon bureau run by another staffer, Ann Mariani. Amazing money outlay!
KGMB put out HUGE bucks in the late 80s and early 90s for me to do documentaries in China, Vietnam and Korea. I do mean HUGE bucks. We won the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for TV, the George Foster Peabody Award.
Would anybody put out that kind of money today? Not a chance.
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It all comes down to what income stream can support newsgathering. Advertising is pretty much the name of the game and that is slowly migrating to the Web, where it is shared by hundreds or thousands of high-traffic sites. The income stream from subs only seems high enough at the level of WSJ.com and supposedly even the Journal is losing big bucks.
Omidyar has stated that his new site is for profit. But it seems that he may very well end up doing just what Bob Jones is talking about.
Taking newspapers and newspaper chains public was the death knell for the kind of spending Bob tells of. And in most cases, it happened because of the perceived needs of the second and third generations of publisher’s families. It’s sad when none of the heirs wants to enter the business–or doesn’t have the talent….