Deep Dive: The changing landscape of print media

Native newspapers are lifeless! Lengthy stay print media!

Because the U.S. marked National Newspaper Week via Oct. 8, legacy-media executives and business observers within the Upstate say they see unrelenting pressures on their non-broadcast enterprise mannequin, from declining readerships to rising operational prices.

“A variety of instances, you’ll hear the time period, ‘sluggish loss of life of native journalism,’ and there’s some fact to that as a result of it takes cash to run a newspaper,” says Bryan Denham, a Clemson College professor of communication, “And if advertisers get the sense that not many individuals are it, then they are going to pull cash.”

Steve Blackwell, writer of The Greer Citizen, is aware of what occurs subsequent:  “When these native newspapers go away these little communities, there’s no watchdog for the federal government, for the city councils, for the college boards.”

From 1986 to 1995, he served as normal supervisor of the hyperlocal Union Every day Occasions — which shuttered two years in the past after 170 years in enterprise.

“It’s a scary proposition that you need to rely upon the honesty of each councilmember or each public official,” he says.

Eddie Burch, whose household bought the Citizen within the Forties, served because the Greer weekly’s information editor for 18 years, starting in 1989.

He says he and his journalists stored an eye fixed on native authorities, the place they may catch such shenanigans as, say, a councilman spending metropolis funds on “drinks at Hilton Head and superb eating at Hilton Head in the course of the municipal affiliation retreat once they have been alleged to be at conferences.”

He says he not often missed a Greer Metropolis Council assembly, the place he reported on, amongst others, tax will increase and charge changes, which he likens to growing fuel and grocery costs: “And other people must know and perceive why their taxes are going up.”

“Within the U.S., roughly 9-in-10 adults get at the very least some information on-line, and the web house has turn out to be a number for the digital houses of each legacy information shops and new, ‘born on the net’ information shops.”

Supply: Pew Research Center

Burch left in 2007, when the family-owned Buchheit Information Administration, based mostly in Spartanburg, acquired the Citizen. Since then, he has been promoting actual property for C. Dan Joyner, although he’s nonetheless a contributing photographer for The Greenville Information, Spartanburg Herald-Journal and Greer Now journal.

He remembers his halcyon days when the century-old paper had little hassle attracting advertisers: “Within the ‘80s, enterprise was straightforward.”

However from 2002 to 2020, U.S. newspaper publishers noticed revenues plummet by 52%, based on the U.S. Census Bureau in a June publish headlined, “Web Crushes Conventional Media: From Print to Digital.”

As for the variety of Palmetto State papers, some 1,600 of them have been established right here since 1732, based on the South Carolina Encyclopedia.

In the present day, solely 4 legacy information operations serve Greenville, based on the South Carolina Press Association. These embrace the Greenville Journal and The Greer Citizen with weekly print editions and the Greenville News and The Post and Courier. The Greenville Information, a part of a nationwide, publicly owned firm, missed the deadline to remark.

The Put up and Courier, the state’s oldest newspaper, began in 1803, entered the Greenville market final yr.

P.J. Browning, president of Evening Post Publishing’s newspaper division and writer of the Charleston broadsheet, says analysis confirmed Greenville to be one other “addressable market.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning paper additionally leverages its infrastructure of statehouse reporters and assets accessible within the publishing firm’s 15 different properties throughout the state, she says. And he or she factors to a brand new sequence of richly reported, deeply native tales: “UNCOVERED: Shining a light on South Carolina corruption and misconduct.”

“We thought, ‘You already know what, it makes extra sense for us to turn out to be this native, actually hyperlocal information group,” she says, including, “It’s all about native, native, native. Now we have homeowners in South Carolina, so we care about South Carolina journalism.”

The enterprise mannequin for the Put up and Courier within the Upstate (the Put up and Courier is in Greenville and Spartanburg) is constructed totally on its statewide digital-subscription base, which Browning says sustains its Upstate newsroom of 10 reporters.

“We’ve been offering native information right here in Greenville for 23 years,” says Mark Johnston, president, CEO and co-founder of Group Journals, which publishes the Greenville Journal. “Our mannequin is that we’re 100% advertiser-supported with no paywall.”  The Put up and Courier’s stout paywall right here, he maintains, means  fewer eyeballs, which suggests much less promoting income to assist that.

Johnston leans on different income streams, too, with strong choices of digital advertising and marketing providers together with six print and digital publications, together with way of life, dwelling and focused magazines — all with a content material mannequin that he says differs from different native newsgathering firms.

Relatively than spending the big time and assets required to provide investigative items, he says,  “All these metropolis and county and civic organizations, charitable organizations, the humanities and leisure want a automobile that may talk their message.”

His publications haven’t any paywalls, and focused households obtain the Journal’s weekly print version at no cost. If newsprint prices weren’t so prohibitive, by no means thoughts a 20% enhance in prices over the past yr, he says he would print one copy every for the county’s 200,000 households.

“If you happen to don’t have distribution and also you don’t have content material, you don’t have something,” he says, then, echoing Blackwell, “And that’s scary.”

A newspaperman because the early Nineteen Eighties, Johnston says, “The day by day newspaper is gone, and so they had a accountability to report on how the group was evolving. Now we’re form of the final man standing right here.”