What is the future of a free press in U.S. cities like San Antonio? It’s a question I’ve been thinking about seriously for nearly 20 years, which is when it became obvious to most newspaper editors and publishers that a long, slow slide was beginning that might never end.
The slide continues. The bottom may not yet be in sight, but the top is a distant memory, and there is no climbing back.
“It’s bleak,” Ken Doctor, a nationally recognized industry expert, recently told the Financial Times for an article on the decline of newspapers in U.S. cities. “The local press is in free fall in the U.S.”
The continuing demise of U.S. newsrooms is all but assured, thanks to the advent of the internet and smartphones. A certain inevitability has only been hastened by hedge fund and corporate owners, where the pressure to maximize profits trumps public service.
Public interest in that slide ebbs and flows, tending to spike when newsroom layoffs make the news as they did earlier this month when the San Antonio Express-News reported the latest round of 14 job cuts. The staff reduction was small; at most companies it would not make for a story. It is news, however, because the cuts add to the cumulative total dating back to the latter years of my time as editor there.
Every eliminated job means one fewer journalist at work in a fast-growing city, and every one of those jobs is a person. Most who lost their jobs have devoted decades to life and work at the Express-News. One of the newspaper’s more recent hires who lost her job was Graham Watson-Ringo, the producer of expressnews.com, the newspaper’s paid subscription site. We at the Rivard Report were in talks with Watson-Ringo about joining our team before her job was eliminated, so hiring her as managing editor worked out well for everyone.
Several years ago I became convinced that for San Antonio and most cities of similar size, nonprofit online news was the best path forward. That’s when the Rivard Report reorganized from for-profit to a 501(C)3 nonprofit.
The choice was clear: continue to serve an ever-growing audience of online readers with insufficient funds to sustain our business, or join an emerging national trend. I was a close observer of the Texas Tribune, launched by Austin venture capitalist John Thornton in 2009 as Texas newspapers drastically reduced their presence in the state capital. Under founding CEO Evan Smith’s fundraising success, the Tribune probably has more reporters and data specialists deployed now than all the daily newspapers combined at their height.
The Tribune is the state’s national-class nonprofit news organization, but there are a number of others in the state and several on the drawing board. The Rivard Report first published in 2012. The Borderzine in El Paso is the newest, a 2018 startup. Beyond Texas, I regularly read MinnPost in the Twin Cities, and Voice of San Diego, both founded the same year as the Texas Tribune.
There are now more than 140 state and city nonprofit media sites in the U.S. that belong to the Institute for Nonprofit News. No one claims these nonprofit news sites equal the historic reach of daily newspapers, but they are making a measurable difference and they are growing rather than declining.
The Rivard Report has grown from a staff of five to our current size of 17 full-time employees and a number of paid freelance contributors, thanks to generous local philanthropists, foundations, advertisers, and our supporting members. We are relatively small but big enough to make a difference.
Building a sustaining membership base to securely underwrite our operations remains the key challenge, one shared by all the INN members. My wife, Monika Maeckle, worked as the development director at Texas Public Radio in the early 1990s. I knew from her work and from friends and fellow journalists at National Public Radio that only one in 10 listeners were supporting members.
Speaking of public radio, TPR is said to be close to reaching its $5 million fundraising goal to underwrite construction of new studios and offices in the historic Alameda Theater downtown. While that move is still a year or two away, it’s bound to raise the NPR affiliate’s profile and highlight its important role in helping fill the growing local news gap.
We face the same membership challenge at the Rivard Report. Less than one in 10 of our daily readers are members. We have to convince more people that the work we do is worthy not only of their time and attention but also their investment.
I would not trade that challenge for the one my former employer, the Express-News, and other regional U.S. newspapers face as fewer people prove willing to pay the rising production and delivery cost of the print newspaper, while even fewer people pay for expressnews.com.
Counting the household I grew up in, I have been a newspaper subscriber all my life. I still subscribe to the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Express-News, but I read them on a tablet. I am that scarce online reader willing to pay to get inside the so-called paywall to read subscriber-access-only news. It’s a bargain when it comes to the Times and the Post, where the pace of innovation and the depth and richness of the content justifies the cost. Elsewhere, including here in San Antonio, that cost-benefit proposition adds up to a shaky business model. The reduced content simply does not justify the price.
So what is the future of a free press in San Antonio? Lifelong newspaper readers are going to face more disappointment as the slide continues. Readers who can adapt to new ways of consuming news will find that many niche sites offer what they need.
Will enough readers in San Antonio find sufficient value in the work we do at the Rivard Report to sustain us as a credible, public service enterprise? The answer so far is yes, and after nearly six and half years, we continue to grow with the city. We do not take that support or readership for granted. We have deeper local coverage and new offerings on the drawing board. We know we can do better.
We also will be working hard to build membership. We love our readers, but we want them to take the next step. Our site will remain open and free to all readers, but those of you who decide to support us can sign up here.
I stopped subscribing to the Express-News years ago when it dawned on me how much I was paying annually for a paper I could read in minutes each day. I do look at the Rivard Report daily. However, as I have voiced many times in the past, its articles tend to be “frilly” and concentrate on growing the inner city of San Antonio. Having worked in the nonprofit and public sector for years, I know there are countless stories of waste and abuse to report on. Reporting on those stories educates the public and holds those nonprofits and public sector entities accountable. Recently I have become a daily viewer of Vice news-every night there is a report on something someone or some entity has done or is doing that needed to be exposed. Hire a good investigative reporter to expand your content. Do not be afraid to expose what is wrong with local entities, both private and public.
I agree.
I contribute to the Rivard Report, and TPR, and PBS. I think independent journalism is important.
But I am disappointed by the quality of analysis in the reporting. If you don’t provide something more than repeating what was said in meetings and presentations, you might as well be re-posting press releases.
Reporters should be skeptical of claims by the powers-that-be. Pull out a calculator, pay attention to the data points. Enrich the story by providing context to third-party sources. The Internet is an amazing tool to pull those resources together.
Emily Royall’s Tierrabyte series could be an informative method to educate readers to evaluate claims by talking about how to analyze data and why something is or isn’t a valid metric.
Dissect the financial statements of City, or SAWS, when they want more money. “How is this different than what they told us last time?”
I am a frequent, and strident, critic because I see a shortfall in critical analysis.
You write that you know you can do better. So do I, and I hope to see “better” in the future.
Joe, I was wondering if I was the only one who felt this way. I’m glad to hear there are at least two of us. Many of the city’s entities and NPO’s activities go unchecked. I feel certain there is news to be told regarding those entities. However, now that the Rivard Report relies on funding from many of the city’s elites and organizations, it will probably remain a neutral news media outlet and possibly a PR arm for these people/organizations.
Like Jill Giles, perhaps?
The aforementioned comments are shared by me and, I know, others. Like you, the editor, I too subscribe to WP and NYT because I can count on them to practice journalism as it was intended. And increasingly our last great hope for democracy.
WAPO and NYT practicing journalism as intended. By whom? Oh. Perhaps it’s a joke.
I have long held that the purposes of a newspaper, in priority, are to inform, to educated, and to entertain. In forty years in my current subscription, I have never seen or heard of a focus group to find what readers really want to read about, other than which new inane comic strip to include. I read the WSJ and USA Today for news and the local paper for local information.
Recently I wrote to Spicer suggesting adding some value to her section. Her rather snotty response was that there was not room and not of interest. “Not room” when most of the SA Life section is coverage of what to watch on TV written by a writer who has almost no journalistic ability to make an article interesting. Ah well. I just renewed my subscription, probably for the last time. I suppose we will next read of limiting publication to three times a week.
To the folks commenting here about the Rivard Report, about the Express-News, about other local news organizations — please, support them all. Especially in the era we’re in, with an all-out assault on journalism, your local press corps needs your support. Bob Rivard hired me at the Express-News in 2006, and I’ve watched the size of our newsroom steadily decline. But the people who are still in the newsroom are fighting to bring you as much news as possible every day, just as the reporters at the Rivard Report, TPR, and local TV stations.
All that said, Bob, I’ll challenge your statement that “Under founding CEO Evan Smith’s fundraising success, the Tribune probably has more reporters and data specialists deployed now than all the daily newspapers combined at their height.”
The Trib’s About Us page shows about 69 people total within the organization. That’s including non-journalists. The EN had 100+ in the newsroom when I arrived in 2006. Emily Ramshaw tweeted today about the Trib’s work product on the crisis at the border about family separation and indicated that her news organization has about 17, or so, journalists.
I’m glad to see your organization growing. I’m glad the Tribune has been successful. I’m glad Ben Olivo has created the San Antonio Heron and that Greg Jefferson is at the San Antonio Current. Like I said, we need as many journalists as possible covering San Antonio and Texas. But newspapers still have sizable staffs…
Josh
Thanks for posting your note. I was inexact in my statement about the number of journalists. I was referring to newspaper reporters permanently based in Austin bureaus, not the newsrooms in the respective cities. Texas metro newspapers still employ more journalists here and around the state than the rest of us put together. I frequently tell my staff that even as we grow we are never going to be the daily newspaper, and we are not going to replace the Express-News. We are different, we are niche, and we are still developing. And we still subscribe, read, and support the Express-News. Thanks, RR