Local newspapers are dead! Long live print media!
As the U.S. marked National Newspaper Week through Oct. 8, legacy-media executives and industry observers in the Upstate say they see unrelenting pressures on their non-broadcast business model, from declining readerships to rising operational costs.
“A lot of times, you’ll hear the term, ‘slow death of local journalism,’ and there’s some truth to that because it takes money to run a newspaper,” says Bryan Denham, a Clemson University professor of communication, “And if advertisers get the sense that not many people are looking at it, then they will pull money.”
Steve Blackwell, publisher of The Greer Citizen, knows what happens next: “When these local newspapers leave these little communities, there’s no watchdog for the government, for the town councils, for the school boards.”
From 1986 to 1995, he served as general manager of the hyperlocal Union Daily Times — which shuttered two years ago after 170 years in business.
“It’s a scary proposition that you have to depend on the honesty of every councilmember or every public official,” he says.
Eddie Burch, whose family purchased the Citizen in the 1940s, served as the Greer weekly’s news editor for 18 years, beginning in 1989.
He says he and his newshounds kept an eye on local government, where they could catch such shenanigans as, say, a councilman spending city funds on “drinks at Hilton Head and fine dining at Hilton Head during the municipal association retreat when they were supposed to be at meetings.”
He says he rarely missed a Greer City Council meeting, where he reported on, among others, tax increases and fee adjustments, which he likens to increasing gas and grocery prices: “And people need to know and understand why their taxes are going up.”
“In the U.S., roughly 9-in-10 adults get at least some news online, and the online space has become a host for the digital homes of both legacy news outlets and new, ‘born on the web’ news outlets.”
Source: Pew Research Center
Burch left in 2007, when the family-owned Buchheit News Management, based in Spartanburg, acquired the Citizen. Since then, he has been selling real estate for C. Dan Joyner, though he’s still a contributing photographer for The Greenville News, Spartanburg Herald-Journal and Greer Now magazine.
He recalls his halcyon days when the century-old paper had little trouble attracting advertisers: “In the ‘80s, business was easy.”
But from 2002 to 2020, U.S. newspaper publishers saw revenues plummet by 52%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau in a June post headlined, “Internet Crushes Traditional Media: From Print to Digital.”
As for the number of Palmetto State papers, some 1,600 of them have been established here since 1732, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia.
Today, only four legacy news operations serve Greenville, according to the South Carolina Press Association. Those include the Greenville Journal and The Greer Citizen with weekly print editions and the Greenville News and The Post and Courier. The Greenville News, part of a national, publicly owned company, missed the deadline to comment.
The Post and Courier, the state’s oldest newspaper, started in 1803, entered the Greenville market last year.
P.J. Browning, president of Evening Post Publishing’s newspaper division and publisher of the Charleston broadsheet, says research showed Greenville to be another “addressable market.”
The Pulitzer Prize-winning paper also leverages its infrastructure of statehouse reporters and resources available in the publishing company’s 15 other properties across the state, she says. And she points to a new series of richly reported, deeply local stories: “UNCOVERED: Shining a light on South Carolina corruption and misconduct.”
“We thought, ‘You know what, it makes more sense for us to become this local, really hyperlocal news organization,” she says, adding, “It’s all about local, local, local. We have owners in South Carolina, so we care about South Carolina journalism.”
The business model for the Post and Courier in the Upstate (the Post and Courier is in Greenville and Spartanburg) is built entirely on its statewide digital-subscription base, which Browning says sustains its Upstate newsroom of 10 reporters.
“We’ve been providing local news here in Greenville for 23 years,” says Mark Johnston, president, CEO and co-founder of Community Journals, which publishes the Greenville Journal. “Our model is that we’re 100% advertiser-supported with no paywall.” The Post and Courier’s stout paywall here, he maintains, means fewer eyeballs, which means less advertising revenue to support that.
Johnston leans on other revenue streams, too, with robust offerings of digital marketing services along with six print and digital publications, including lifestyle, home and targeted magazines — all with a content model that he says differs from other local newsgathering companies.
Rather than spending the enormous time and resources required to produce investigative pieces, he says, “All these city and county and civic organizations, charitable organizations, the arts and entertainment need a vehicle that can communicate their message.”
His publications have no paywalls, and targeted households receive the Journal’s weekly print edition for free. If newsprint costs weren’t so prohibitive, never mind a 20% increase in costs over the last year, he says he would print one copy each for the county’s 200,000 households.
“If you don’t have distribution and you don’t have content, you don’t have anything,” he says, then, echoing Blackwell, “And that is scary.”
A newspaperman since the early 1980s, Johnston says, “The daily newspaper is gone, and they had a responsibility to report on how the community was evolving. Now we’re kind of the last man standing here.”
South Carolina’s shrinking papers
Between 2004 and 2018, South Carolina saw a 14% contraction in daily and weekly newspapers and a decline of 23% in daily and weekly circulation.
2019
Dailies: 15
Weeklies: 79 (73 now)
Total: 94
2004
Dailies: 16
Weeklies: 93
Total 109
Newspaper circulation
2019
Daily: 370,000
Weekly: 710,000
Total: 1.1 million
2004
Daily: 610,000
Weekly: 790,000
Total: 1.4 million
Source: UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Expanding news deserts
“The residents of America’s emerging news deserts are often its most vulnerable cities,” according to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Nearly 200 of the nation’s 3,143 counties have no newspaper
- More than 1,400 U.S. counties, ranging in size from several hundred residents to more than 1 million, have one newspaper, usually a weekly
- More than 2,000 counties have no daily newspaper
- Of the roughly half of the nation’s 7,112 newspapers – 1,283 dailies and 5,829 weeklies – more than 5,000, operating in small, rural communities, have a circulation of less than 15,000.
Sources: Living Without a Newspaper, “The Loss of Newspapers and Readers,” UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
