I was wandering the web and stumbled across a copy of the Star-Advertiser’s current contract with the newspaper guild that runs through August 2016. Guild members are now represented by the Pacific Media Workers Guild (TNG-CWA Local 39521), based in San Francisco.
Since the Hawaii Newspaper Guild was merged with the Pacific Media Workers Guild, there’s no public reporting of the number of guild members at individual newspapers or the total number in the state.
Previously, the Hawaii Newspaper Guild filed a separate LM-2 report with the U.S. Department of Labor itemizing the number of members at each of the newspapers where it had contracts.
Now, however, Guild members in Hawaii are somewhere among the 1,354 members of the combined multi-state local reported in the union’s latest LM-2 report. Search for File # 36746 in the Department of Labor’s Online Public Disclosure Room.
Meanwhile, the Seattle Times is joining the ranks of newspapers erecting pay walls. According to a column over the weekend by executive editor David Boardman, the pay wall will go up in mid-March.
The reasons for this development are simple: The economics of the news business, and of the newspaper industry in particular, have changed dramatically over the past decade. More people than ever are reading our content in print and digital formats, but our primary source of revenue — advertising — is declining locally and nationally and no longer supports our costs to the degree it once did.
Since its launch in 1996, access to Seattletimes.com has been free. We have charged our readers only for distribution of the printed newspaper, and at a price that only partially covered the costs of the ink, paper, trucks and carriers.
The expenses of the newsroom — reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, graphic artists, page designers, researchers, bloggers, digital producers — and of all of the supporting departments necessary to operate this place (Finance, Human Resources, Information Technology, etc.), were covered by advertising revenue.
The math no longer adds up. We need to evolve in the way we do business, just as we have in the way we deliver our content to you.
If you happen to blog or aspire to your own blog, or perhaps if publishing economics just interests you, check out the recent podcast of NPR’s Planet Money, “Can Andrew Sullivan Make It On His Own?”
It’s pretty sobering.
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I pay $0.75 cents for a newspaper. I’d guess there are about 50-100 articles in every paper. So, being generous, let’s say an average of $0.02 per article. An individual blogger like Andrew Sullivan is attempting to unbundle the delivery of articles in a newspaper, a commodity that is struggling in today’s fiscal reality. If he gets ten times the number of viewers of the average blog, he’ll have 1,000 viewers. Even if they are all willing to pay top dollar (or 2 cents) per article, he’ll get $20 per article. If he writes 365 days a year, he’ll have to write 8.2 articles per day to gross $60,000 per year from subscriptions. And that’s assuming people are willing to pay unbundled prices for articles. Then you have to consider what prices advertiser will be willing to pay to place more ads on increasing numbers of unbundled sites. Diminishing returns, and sobering, indeed.
My firm belief is that if folks attempt to start a blog or a website with the only intent in it… is to make money… then their readers will read through it real quickly.
I don’t know of ANY folks in Hawaii that can support themselves on their blog alone.
I blog for a hobby and feel fortunate to have sponsorships and trades for space on my site.
Certainly nothing I could ever live off of though!
There are lots of folks all over the world that make a killing blogging obviously… I don’t know them personally.
However my belief is that you just can’t toss together a website and get paid for it.
I still get folks that ask how much bloggers get paid per page visit. (sigh)
even if you could support yourself Entirely from blogging …..
how many people could actually blog for their entire career, from graduation to grave??? i’ve been very impressed that Ian has been doing daily blogging for so long — but I find him to be an excellent exception to a sobering rule. Ian’s blogging is very intruiging and investigative and based on a newspaper reporter’s experience and background. if I were start blogging about pop music or politics tomorrow, i think i would last about a month. at best. and then i’d find something better.
Civil Beat just had a story on the swallowing of Kauai’s newspaper by the news monopoly.
It is interesting that the editor of the Seattle Times wrote that more people than ever are reading the content of his paper. The problem is revenues. So we need to be careful when we talk about the crisis in journalism. The news is flourishing in terms of readership, even local news. The problem is cash flow.
Even if declining revenues means more layoffs, if more people than ever are reading newspapers, then layoffs themselves are not a problem to society as a whole, although it may hurt journalists.
The problem is content, what all these new eyes are looking at. Just like in the HBO show The Wire, the first reporters to get laid off are the legendary old-timers with their vast wealth of local knowledge. In their place are promoted the mediocre hacks who pursue “human interest” fluff pieces (potentially fictional) about “boy bites dog”. Also, as we see on Oahu, it might mean more corporate propaganda in the guise of reporting.
So two things seem to be happening. First, more people at the local level are reading the newspaper online as it becomes more readily available. But their tastes and interests are not those of the educated minority. So it’s not just that newspapers cannot afford reporters. Newspapers don’t need staff when the new readership primarily wants entertainment.
Second, the educated minority now has free access to massive amounts of elite and global news. I remember an article profiling Al Gore, mostly of him just hanging out at his home. Every 15 minutes he turned toward his laptop to survey Google News, regardless of what he was doing (working, eating, playing or arguing with his family, etc.). The educated minority, affluent or not, are better informed than ever about global events and issues, and at almost no cost. In contrast, at the local level, investigative reporters are the first in line to be given the ax. Yet the majority is more content than ever in their bovine bliss, undisturbed by knowledge.