Sunday, November 08, 2009
Bob McChesney with Mark Contreras, Senior Vice President/Newspapers, EW Scripps

6:30 
Greetings. Welcome back to Media Matters. I'm your host Bob McChesney, coming to you live today on WILL AM 580. A good friend of mine has said and has written that America was founded by journalists, referring to Tom Paine and the influence he had on how this very nation's revolution took place and how this nation came into being. And in many respects, this nation's been defined by its newspapers and journalism throughout its history, it's almost been a defining feature of the American experience. So we find ourselves in a very extraordinary position today where that defining institution, newspapers, and possibly even what represents journalism are under sustained attack, their very survival now in question. We are very fortunate to have on a program called Media Matters someone who is in the heart of trying to wrestle with keeping journalism alive in the United States. Our guest today is Mark Contreras, Senior Vice President in charge of newspapers for the Scripps firm. Before that, he worked for the Pulitzer. He's also the vice chairman for the Newspaper Association of America, the lead trade association for the newspaper industry. He will assume the chairmanship in 2010. Mark Contreras, welcome to Media Matters.

MC: Thanks, Bob. Thanks for having me. 

BM: Well, it's great to have you here. I can't tell you how many times our listeners in the past year have been asking about this question with our various guests and I've been wanting to have someone from the inside who's actually working with the businesses who knows what's going on the ground with daily newspapers in particular and newsrooms in particular on the air to field questions listeners might have. First Mark, if we can get to brass tacks: people hear horror stories about bankruptcies and closings and layoffs and downsizings. Can you give an overview, a thumbnail sketch if you will of what the main trends have been in daily newspaper publishing in the last 2-3 years, where they've come from and where they're going. How deep have the losses been?

MC: Sure. I guess I should start by saying that what often gets attention nationally are what happens to big city newspapers. And I want to make a distinction there right from the beginning. If you look at the industry overall, there are 1400 daily newspapers in the country. Fewer than 100 of them are bigger than the Pantegraph in Bloomington, Il. for example.

BM: Nearby us.

MC: Yeah, very, very close. So what you read about is a story narrative that is really germane primarily to big city newspapers and doesn't speak as clearly to the majority of other newspapers. That said, what's happening to all newspapers in America is for the last 30, 40 years, every newspaper that operated went through a phase and I'd say even going back 30, 40, 50 years there used to be two many be three newspapers in every town and that got consolidated to one. In the late 70s, classified advertising became a realy power house in terms of the revenue it represented for newspapers and from the 80s, 90s and really until the mid 2000s being in the newspaper business wasn't just a great mission and a great calling, and an incredibly important powerful institution in each community for good, it was a heck of a good business with very strong profit margins. But when you peel back the onion and you understand why that was, it's largely because of classified advertising. 

BM: I want you to go back to the broader narrative but I think people are familiar with the classified ads but could you put some numbers on that, I'm interested in that too, and it is striking what percentage of the revenues came from classifieds?

MM: Sure. If you look at a typical daily newspaper and Scripps has been, Scripps is a 150 year old company founded primarily, sorry more than a 125 year organization, founded with newspapers and we've diversified in other areas. We went back to the 1980s and looked at the amount of classified and the amount of profit and then tracked it over the next 20 or 30 years. You could make a strong argument that had it not been for classified advertising, our newspapers would not have been profitable. So if you stop and think about that for a second, they may have represented 50% of the advertising revenue of a daily newspaper depending on the size. And a daily newspaper had about 80 to 85% of its revenues in advertising and 20-15% in circulation. But that chunk of, that half of the revenue was incredibly profitable because the rates were much higher and therefore much more of that revenue dropped right to the bottom line. And it was able to sustain the newspapers profits.

BM: And newspapers were the only place really where that market existed so they sort of had that whole market to themselves. 

MC: Exactly, exactly. 

BM: And they were usually monopoly papers by the 70s in their town so it was  nice to own sort of the bazaar so to speak.

MC: Absolutely. They were clearly the market place to get people who wanted to buy things and people who wanted to sell things together. So we got a extraordinarily hefty fee for being the market place and if you look at what' happened with internet penetrations in the country, just going back a couple of years to 2009, the penetration of online users in the country was about 44%. When you fast forward to 2008, it's about 74% with an increasing amount being high speed broadband. So what happens is, it allows people to buy and sell things but with much greater efficiency, which is not good for an incumbent like us that had put buyers and sellers together with us being the only efficiency. 

BM: And that has been devastating to newspaper revenues as you point out.

MC: Yeah, and it's now terribly exciting and it's not one of those issues that gets a lot of attention because it's kind of boring frankly. But if you want to really dig into what is causing the most amount of economic pain in newspapers today, it is that issue. It's not that our audiences are shrinking, because they've never been bigger on a combined basis. But it's really the seismic change in what's happening in the classifieds. 

BM: How many daily newspapers, Mark Contreras, have gone out of business in the past two years say?

MC: Well, the one that you've heard about: we obviously made a decision to exit Denver, and there have been a handul of others that have stopped publication. I'm thinking about Tucson Arizona and we also had a couple of other JOAs in Birmingham, Alabama and Albuquerque, New Mexico. But JOAs are not really, when you read about those papers closing, those are not, they're kind of a construct of a legal model, it's just a little bit, it's an outlier in terms of what I think should be the general debate on daily newspapers.

BM: Mark, I think we've already gotten into the weeds here of wonkery with the term JOA. I think we may have left a ...

MC: Joint operating agreement, which is a legal anti-trust agreement that newspapers can have to keep two newspapers operating in each town. And there are very few of those left so it's really kind of a side issue. Even a big newspaper, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, others that people have heard of, there in bankruptcy or coming out of bankruptcy but they're still operating.

BM: Are their operating expenses in the black? Is it just debt they had to get rid of by going bankrupt?

MC: You know, I don't know the answer in those two cases because they're private. But my hunch is that they're pretty close to it when they leave bankruptcy. 

BM: Our guest today on Media Matters, you've just been listening to, is Mark Contreras, senior vice president at Scripps in charge of newspapers. Also, vice chairman at the Newspaper Association of America,  the trade association representing daily newspapers and going to become soon the chairmanship of the NAA next year, in 2010. We're talking about newspapers, what's happening to them, and journalism, what's happening to it in the United States. If you'd like to call in with a question or comment for Mark Contreras, the number here at Media Matters is 333.9455; the toll free number 1-800-222-9455. 

Mark Contreras, earlier this year in a very influential piece that was first published online appropriately enough and then later was put in print in a number of publications, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University professor, wrote an essay basically saying newspapers are dead or going to die and the internet was going to kill them. It was no point even being sad about it, I mean it was unfortunate in many ways but it was inevitable, this technological revolution simply was going to make newsprint on paper, on newspaper eventually obsolete and it looked like it wouldn't really take an especially long time. I suspect you're familiar with this argument.

MC: Uh, yes.

BM: And I suspect it got the attention of many people in your industry, although I don't think it took much to get their attention in this economy. How do you respond to that? 

MC: Well, today, despite all of the bad news that you hear, there are in our case several hundred thousand, five hundred, six hundred thousand people who agree to invite our publication into their home because they like the format of what print offers them.

What's interesting about that general comment, is that if you look back over time at what has happened to newspapers with the advent of radio, television,and cable television, every single time those media were created, somebody made the inevitable prediction that it was going to cause the death of newspapers in X amount of time. I think Ted Turner in 1980 said or 1970, in 10 years newspapers will be dead. Rumors, as Mark Twain said, rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated. So I don't think the printed form of the newspaper is going to die in our lifetime. I do think eyeballs are going to continue to go online and much of our usage is going to be, much of the product of our journalists's work is going to be consumed online both as text and photos and videos. And frankly, if you're coming into the business at this point in time it's a pretty exciting time to come in as a journalist because you're not just assigned to do a story and put it into text and see it in next day's paper. The expectations are to not only develop a well written story but also produce some either video or some graphics with it. It really develops a much more wellrounded journalist at the end of the day. And we still have the largest newsrooms in each of the markets that we operate in. So do most newspapers. 

BM: Let's just go through that for a second. You work for Scripps. How many newspapers does Scripps have in its stable?

MC: Well, we operate in 13 markets and in some of those markets, we own several dailies and several weeklies. And other kinds of publications. But 13 markets is probably the easiest way to understand it.

BM: And what's the largest of your markets? 

MC: Memphis.

BM: Memphis? Heavens. What's the smallest?

MC: The smallest is probably Anderson, South Carolina. 

BM: That's getting down there. Does Scripps also have broadcast holdings?

MC: Yes. Scripps has three lines of business: newspapers, broadcast television, which operates in 10 large metro markets in the country and then United Media, which is a licensing business, which licenses Peanuts and other comics throughout the world.

BM: Our guest again, Mark Contreras, from Scripps newspapers, joining us an executive there. Also soon to be the chair of the Newspaper Association of America, the trade association grappling with the future of newspapers. Mark, if I can take your comments, what I'm sensing from you is that newspapers will continue but there may be a day at some point down the road when it will, when the primary form of consumption of newspapers will be digital, no longer news print on paper. Is that correct?

MC: I don't think it will be exclusively there. But yes, we see eyeballs and many of our users moving to online. 

BM: You know, along those lines and I don't want to scare away our listeners with too detailed, wonky questions or discussion but it seems like a very important point for them to understand the situation we're in. I recall earlier this year, I believe in May or June, a Moody's Report assessing newspapers that came out which I suspect you're familiar with?

MC: Yes.

BM: Which said, and correct me if I'm misrepresenting what it said 'cause I'm doing this off the top of my head, that roughly two-thirds of the expenses of newspapers were for what we'd call old media expenses, printing, distribution, trucks and that was really turning into a dead rocket engine dragging down the rocket. And it suggested if I recall, that basically newspapers had to figure out a way to drop that dead engine and just cut their expenses down to that 20 or 30% that was going into content production and other related work. Is that correct?

MC: Uh, that's roughly right. If we looked at our newspapers, roughly 20-25% of our people are engaged either in news gathering or in advertising sales. And when we look at the business long-term, the two areas that are going to create enduring value for us and allow us to continue our mission, is the ability to have the best newsroom in any market and the best sales force in any market. But to the Moody's study point, if you just chopped our business up to print or online, and you said "How many dollars do we generate on average per print eyeball? And how many dollars do we generate per online eyeball?" I mean there's a big disconnect there which is one of the, kind of the problem that keeps us up at night the most. In print we get paid $507 per year, per eyeball. Online, that's about $75.

BM: That's per pair of eyeballs, right?

MC: Per pair of eyeballs, right. Sorry about that.

BM: You might have one eyed readers for all I know...

MC: But, in general though, that difference, the $500 versus the $75 is one of the thorniest problems we've got and ultimately what that means is that we're going to have to take the amount of effort and resources and expense in our business that don't relate to news and advertising sales and do them much more cheaply. We've really worked on that at Scripps for the last several years and pared that down. But as long as we're in the print business there is the reality that's going to be there. But companies for example are getting much more eager to share printing expenses, to share distribution expenses, all the things that help get the trains running on time that are very, very expensive.

BM: The question of advertising underlies Clay Shirky's sort of despondency for the future of newspapers, certainly for print newspapers and possibly his argument would extend online, which is that once you go to the online realm, advertisers who've been, like the classified advertisers is the best example but he's arguing even product advertisers, display advertisers as they're called in the industry, once you enter the online world then suddenly newsrooms, newspapers, Scripps with their websites are not just competing with other news providers but any other website that might reach eyeballs. And this accounts for why you go from the $500 to the $75 per eyeball because the competition is raised so dramatically. And Shirky's argument is that the math just won't ever add up that way, that you're never gonna get that $75 to use your figure up to $500 because you're in a much more competitive sea out there. But what's your take on that argument?

MC: There's no question about that. If we looked at our online audiences, they've grown 30-50% over the last five years and so have every other publishers' and so have all websites. One of the dilemmas, and this is getting pretty wonky, but if you look at what happened in television in the 50s. Television for the first 15 years of its life really had no defined way to define its audience. And by that I mean there was not Nielson around to say that this TV station generated this many viewers in a given week. For 15 years, television floundered around and really in a way made up what their audience statistics were until Congress in 1963 discerned that there was enough fraud going on in this area that they really, they said to the industry either you deal with this and self-regulate or we're going to step in. The industry television broadcasters decided to create something called the Media Ratings Council, which eventually then set standards and Nielson at the time became the gold standard. What you see happening there in 1963 is television as a business in terms of its revenues and we've owned television stations at Scripps since the 40s so we went back and looked at this. If you looked at when standards were imposed in the early 60s for the next 20 years, revenues skyrocketed and one of the reasons revenues skyrocketed is because it took the chaos out of the market that existed in the 50s. We're in exactly the same boat today with internet audience and revenue. We're in year 15 or 16 of the internet and yet there's still really are not universally defined gold standard definitions as to what a unique visitor is to a website. Once that happens and I have some confidence that it will, I think we'll see a chaos dissipate from the market place which is currently raging today.

BM: Our guest today you've just been listening to Mark Contreras, senior vice president of Scripps in charge of newspapers and also soon to be chairman of the executive committee the Newspaper Association of America, the trade association of daily newspapers. The telephone number here if you'd like to talk to Mark Contreras with a question or a comment is 333.9455; the toll free number 1.800.222.9455. Let's go to our telephones right now. Line one Champagne County you're on the air.

Caller: Good afternoon gentleman. I've heard the line that the founding framers were actually you know newspaper men and I've heard Bob, before you say they did things like subsidize newsprint and subsidize mail delivery to sort of foster the rather cantankerous pamphleteers of the era and newspapers. And I know that pre-net, I think, espouses some kind of, at least I think there was even a bill in the senate talking about some way of finding a content neutral way of subsidizing media. Now, I've mainly focused on newspapers it seems to be that the media policy would look at ways of enhancing the right to communicate, which is a right in the UN charter or the proceedings anyway. It's been talked about and I think a lot of people do espouse to the rights of individuals and communities and various associations to have the right to communicate their ideas that that's a place to go. I don't know if this is something that Glenn Beck is attacking you for or one of the many things that he can find, the idea of the state subsidizing the media you point out the history of, in the post colonial days. So I wanted you to talk a bit your ideas on that. But as one aside before I go, Sy Hersh was awarded a prize by the University of Illinois. I don't know if they had other people on board and I hope it doesn't mean that his health is bad or something like that. But it was at the National Press Cup on Friday and contrary to most of the national press cup events it wasn't streamed as far as I can tell. I don't know if you guys can make that discussion available because that's one of the dimensions of what's falling apart is the lack of commitment to investigative journalism, people like Hersh who you know gets in and talks about the covert war against Iran and all of that stuff that needs to be said and still isn't shared widely and um, well I hope you can, I want to at least get that out there. I'm sure he's probably a pessimist about that giving the cut backs to investigative journalists. I'll hang up and listen.

BM: Well, thank you very much caller. Mark Contreras, I mean one point that the caller mentioned, which is that early, the first several generations of the republic there was no sense among the founders or the members of Congress or anyone in the country for that matter the market place could provide sufficient journalism left to its own devices. And we had extraordinary by contemporary standards, postal and printing subsidies of newspapers. Do you think we might be at a point where the market is not going to be able to deliver the goods and we might have to come up with enlightened policies like Jefferson and Madison came up with to keep journalism alive?

MC: Well, I mean there are a couple of big differences. And one of the things that we treat, that we hold very sacred at Scripps is the first amendment and the role newspapers have in the first amendment. We treat that very seriously. One thing is, one of the issues regarding how we get paid traditionally has been by getting 20% of our dollars from subscribers and 80% from advertisers. If you go back in the business to the 50s that was more like 60/40 and were headed back there. We're headed to a period I think in print particularly where we're gonna rely more on our subscribers by paying us more than we have in the past and the reason is we really didn't push circulation rates much in the last 10 years because all of our leverage was on advertising revenue. I still think that's a lever that you're gonna see more and more newspapers pulling. And frankly at this point the readers who we have are ones who really, really tell us all the time we want you to stay in business so I think we'll be able to get that. But the other issue facing the industry is how we get paid for content online. There is a nascent effort on the part of many publishers to look at ways that we can track where our content goes online. Because unlike in print where we publish something on paper and we know we deliver it to a set of people and that's generally who the end user is and how it gets consumed. Online, it can go, literally it can go to infinite other, get used and reused by infinite other sources of people. And unlike the music industry we haven't come up with the solution to get paid for that. And I'll just give you a quick example. In the music industry today Americans spent $10 billion on music whether digital or physical CDs. There are two organizations that have been legally chartered, BMI and ASCAP, which on behalf of musicians go out and make contracts with people like bars, stadiums and public places that play music and say to them, if you're gonna use music, you have to pay something back to the originator of that content. And so those organizations sign a contract. Those two organizations generated about $2.5 billion for musicians in 2008. No such construct exists for the newspaper industry. And yet we know our content gets used and reused and used again by a variety of other sources, bloggers, other aggregators and so there's an ongoing discussion going on in the industry to be able to get monetary compensation for that kind of use which can help us. It's not going to be a panacea by a long shot but it's going to help us.

BM: Along those lines, Mark Contreras, there's been a lot of talk in the trade press at least and a little bit in the broader business press about newspaper companies and journalism producers, journalism content producers trying to establish some sort of paywall on the internet where all the news content providers will on the other side of a paywall and people will have to pay the get inside so that the journalism can be compensated for and if someone doesn't pay to get inside, they don't get access to the content. Rupert Murdock, I think, has been, his British papers and his American papers has been outspoken in his support of some sort of mechanism along these lines and I know, I'm certain, you've been considering it in your deliberations in the NAA. What are your thoughts on that and where does that stand?

MC: Well, using some of the examples from our company that would lead me to believe that putting up a paywall to limit access to our content is not a fruitful way to go. We've had experiments at our Knoxville newspaper as well as our Albuquerque newspaper that we are partners with the Lang family on. And if you look at the usage of that sight and the revenue that it generates compared to leaving, what we do on all our other websites is all the content is free and we sell ads around that. Both the audience and the revenue picture is healthier in a free environment even as limited as that is today. So I don't see that today there's a panacea. The one thing that is a need that we have unlike other industries if you look at the cable industry or other media industries, nationally there are a handful of organizations which have figured out a way to work together very effectively and can make major decisions as a block. There are 1400 daily newspapers in the country, there's probably several hundred individual different owners of newspapers and historically we have not really done a good job at working together on common solutions partly because we're concerned about running afoul of antitrust laws and we really don't want to do that but in this new world where scale online is a requirement I think we're going to have to be able to engage in more specific and deliberate conversations than we've been able to have in the past. And again that's an unsettled issue but it's one that's actively being discussed.

BM: Our guest Mark Contreras from the Newspapers Association of America and executive at Scripps Newspapers. Our number here at Media Matters if you'd like to call in for Mr. Contreras is 333-9455; our toll free number is 1-800-222-9455. I'm Bob McChesney, I'm your host. Next week our guest will be [Max] Blumenthal. We'll be talking about his new book, Republican Gomorrah, which I'm looking forward to and in two weeks our guest will be Barbara Ehrenreich talking about her new book and we'll have more about next week and the following week of course. So do call in if you have any questions today. I want to go back Mark Contreras, if I can, to the question of advertising. The relationship of advertising support to journalism has always been a contentious or controversial one because of concerns that publishers and editors might have pressure either direct or indirect to sort of provide a product that would be of more interest to advertisers than necessarily to journalism due to commercial pressures. To such extent as you probably know your own company, Scripps, pioneered the idea of having ad-less newspapers almost 100 years ago, I believe in Chicago if I'm not mistaken. 

MC: Yes, in several markets.

BM: Several markets. 'cause Scripps is, EW Scripps himself was quite cynical or skeptical toward advertising and giving business too much influence. It seems if you go online, one of the trends that people are concerned about, that I've seen a lot written about, has been that with the increased competition to get ad dollars by news media there's more and more pressure to make advertisers happy to get their business it's going to have a corrosive effect on journalistic standards, that's a tension. Do you see that as an issue that you're concerned with at Scripps and that you have to somehow address?

MC: Actually, you know it's interestingly quite the opposite. What the internet has done for our business in terms of the cycle of news gathering has actually made us more aggressive. And here's what I mean: in the past, if our only deadline to meet was the print deadline, stories had to be edited and things had to be figured out by the late evening. And, the first time somebody would get a look at it would be in the next morning's paper. What the internet has done to our news cycle is made it almost 24/7. We're much more likely to post a preliminary story right away and then as the day goes on and we get additional facts or we want to do a rewrite, we'll update as the day goes on or add video to it or add photos to it. Online I don't see the internet has done anything but made our entire news operations more aggressive and frankly more of a public service than they were in the past.

BM: You know, I don't think I, I must have asked the question poorly. Let me rephrase it because what I was getting at was rather that as the need for advertising, it's more difficult to get advertising online than it is in traditional print. And advertising is still an important source of revenues that to attract advertising in a highly competitive market where advertisers really have much more leverage than they used to have over potential purchasers, places to put their advertising that it might compromise journalistic standards if journalists desperate to get that business there'd be subtle pressure to do the sort of journalism that's going to most appeal to advertisers and not necessarily to readers. Does that make more sense?

MC: Yeah, yeah. And I, I mean those kind of pressures have been part of our business for the last 100 years and you know,...

BM: Are they increased now as we go online in this new competitive environment?

MC: I don't see the advent of the internet tilting the scales any more than they were in the past. That said, there have been constant pressures like that. And every publisher who’s been in a publisher's chair for more than a couple of years has had that dilemma face him or her. The way we operate as a company, I always give the example of the auto dealer who gets caught for DUI and wants to have his or her name taken out of the paper. And the right thing to do in that situation is to make sure that absolutely nothing that the newsroom does is affected. That the newsroom doesn't even hear about that because you know if you're going to lose some money because of a case like that you're gonna lose some money. But at the end of the day what we've got as a newspaper institution is trust and the minute that that goes off the rails, there's really not much left. So in our case, you know, we're pretty firm about making sure those kind of pressures don't effect us. And certainly the internet hasn't exacerbated that tension I think. 

BM: Mark Contreras, I am a college professor and have been teaching for over a quarter century I dare say now going back to when I started as a graduate student and have been reading newspapers my entire life and one of the things that has been striking to me anecdotally has been the decline in newspaper readership among college age students over the course of my career. And since I'm in media courses, I'm always getting a show of hands and I'm talking about current events and trying to find out where people get their information and while it's anecdotal it's a little more than anecdotal because it's something I consistently ask my students. When I was a college student in the early 70s virtually everyone I knew read newspapers and often times more than one a day. By the 80s I would say it was certainly a majority but no more than a majority and certainly not unanimous and by the 90s it was a minority and today it's a distinct minority of college age students that read newspapers. When I ask for a show of hands sometimes only a handful go up if anyone's read a newspaper in the last two or three days. And you know this is a phenomenon. I guess the point I'm trying to get at here rather than give a speech is that it predates the world wide web, it predates the economic recession, it goes back.. I looked at Tom Patterson's research from Harvard and as I understand it youth readership of newspapers, college age kids, was basically the same as adults into the late 60s or early 70s at which point it sort of diverged from the adult level percentage of readership and started declining and declining dramatically over the last three and a half decades. You know, even though the total number of newspaper readers may be up, the population of this country has doubled in the last generation and a half or two generations. What can be done? Why did young people stop reading newspapers I guess is the first obvious question? Or why did a large percentage of them stop reading them? And then is there anyway they're ever going to come back to journalism?

MC: Well one of the big differences in the last 10 years. We just dropped our son off to college this September. My wife and I were talking about how different it was for both of us just 25 years ago. What is clear is that there is more media consumption going on by those kids but they're being consumed largely through the lens of devices, either personal computers, phones or I-Phones. So our challenge as an industry to make sure we at least keep a portion of their attention is to make sure we're available on all the platforms they may avail themselves for news or information or entertainment. There are pockets of areas where we can still play an important role but the physical printed newspaper is a challenge that is going to continue to challenge us for many, many years. Our brands and our content though still can live but in the incarnation of a device because I think those are the defacto new tools that your students and certainly kids like my son are always going to have with them. And as they age, those kind of devices and that kind of consumption are going to continue. So we're putting a lot of effort into making sure that our content is available in various platforms. We've signed an agreement with the Amazon folks to be on the Kindle. That is not again a panacea. None of these are panaceas to fix our core business but they are bets that we want to make sure we are relevant to kids in the future.

BM: I don't want to put too fine a point on this but this drop off began in the 70s and 80s and continued into the 90s and present long before the internet, long before cell phones and IPods and in other countries like Norway and Germany, which are even more broadband connected especially Scandinavia than the United States, newspaper readership among young people hasn't fallen off anywhere near as much. Is there something, something more fundamental at play here that the industry has to look at in terms of why isn't our product in 1978, 1983, 1989 or 1994 attracting, what is it about our product that is not attractive to young people? 

MC: Well if you went back to newspapers in the 60s...Actually we asked our folks to do this: Go back and take their newspaper from the 50s and 60s and you looked at what the paper looked like. It was all printed on letter press presses with heavy you know it was not a graphically pleasing it wasn't a pretty paper but what you saw in the 40s, 50s and 60s were newspapers with lots of points of entry in them, lots of nuggets of information not just long stories. And in the 70s and 80s it became very fashionable for us was incredibly long stories and some would argue boring but others you needed to be long to make it good work and you lost the appeal of lots and lots of nuggets and points of entry for readers. I'm not sure, Bob, if that is any explanation for the phenomenon that you've described with younger people. I think there's probably deeper cultural reasons for that as much as product reasons for newspapers. What we've tried to do at Scripps is make sure that from at least for our subscribers that we have lots and lots of points of entry in our newspapers and we have people who know the community well. But this is again another interesting development. In the 30s, 40s and 50s most daily newspapers did not have large full time staff. Most publishers had come through the depression, had their newspapers survive possibly with another competitor or two in their town, they learned how to be very scrappy. They had some full time staffers but they had a whole network of stringers in correspondence and that's how the paper got fat with lots of nuggets of information. What happened in the 60s well really in the 70s and 80s is the idea of stringers really fell out of fashion. And I think that's a detriment to many daily newspapers. Journalism became much more of a profession which generally is a good thing but the idea of having big networks in a lot of papers just fell out of favor. What we've been trying to do is redevelop those networks of contributors, eyes and ears that can help us keep more information in the newspaper but do it on a much more economical basis. Our experience has been, when we've opened our arms to the community and said we would like people to help us be correspondents, stringers and provide us information on your neighborhood and your communities, they've responded very, very well.

BM: Our guest Mark Contreras from the Newspaper Association of America, senior vice president at Scripps, in charge of the newspaper division. The phone number here if you want to call, we have time for another call or two, is 333-9455; toll free 1-800-222-9455. Let's go back to the phone lines right now. Line 4 Charleston, you're on the air with Mark Contreras.

Line 4: Hello and thank you. A couple of quick things. First of all I grew up in a poor family and we always subscribed to the newspaper and in fact when I was growing up there were two daily newspapers, morning and afternoon. And we always subscribed to one of them. People out of preference morning or afternoon because there was a different in content. But that aside, this is actually my husband's idea although he thinks he read it somewhere but he won't call. So I'm calling about the idea of attaching a surcharge, a fee, something of that sort to your ISP, your online connectivity bill, which would then be a pool of resource for online newspapers to draw from for a source of income because we're very concerned here about the real or potential demise of newspapers and particularly investigative journalism. And then a third point is just kind of the strange turn that news has taken the trend a few years back of going to what's called happy news. I think that actually served to destroy people's interest and curiosity. And then the moving away from news into all opinion which the takeover kind of blogs in particular I think Huffington started out pretty good maybe but it's really I think quote unquote dumbing down badly and rapidly. But in any case news and opinion and blogging, that overlap, and the surcharge idea if you could discuss that. And thank you very much and we pray for your good health and prosperity.

MC: You're in Charleston, Illinois?

Line 4: Correct.

MC: And what papers did you subscribe to when you were growing up.

Line 4: Oh, I didn't grow up here. I grew up in Peoria actually. It was the Peoria Journal Star.

MC: Yep.

Line 4: OK.

BM: Thank you very much caller. Mark Contreras?

MC: It's a great idea. Here are the issues that we're dealing with. As an industry, we still have lots and lots of different owners who have different opinions about how to deal with these challenges. But when you're talking about getting an agreement with a completely different industry, the cable industry for example, going to them and saying we would like, we will allow cable subscribers, internet ISP subscribers to access content and we expect to pay a charge from you, my prediction is that that will become a very, um, difficult discussion for us to have alone. Now, if it's imposed on them, and I'm not arguing that the newspaper industry ought to push for this but if for whatever reason that were imposed on them then I think that might be a help but I just wanna make one point very clearly. There is no silver bullet here. One stream of revenue for content alone is not going to make up for what has happened in classified advertising. It will help, every little bit will help but that's the dilemma that we face today is that we need 10 or 15 silver bullets to get back into stable health.

BM: Mark Contreras, about three years ago now, just about exactly, Harry Chandler, the heir to the Chandler fortune from the Los Angeles Times dynasty that was eventually was sold to the Tribune Company and then on to Sam Zells empire and has gone through a variety of changes in the last few years. But Harry Chandler came out and said that the traditional form of newspaper ownership that he made his fortune at you know was an irreversible decline in his view and that if we're going really have journalism at local owned newspapers should be run like the Greenbay Packers. They should be community, nonprofit, if not nonprofits locally owned, wed to the community, but basically an entirely new business model. Earlier this year, Senator Carden of Maryland proposed legislation to allow newspapers to convert from commercial structures to some sort of nonprofit or foundation structure so they could receive the benefits of being a nonprofit institution and both of them were speaking in terms that the existing system was failing, not that they wanted to replace a healthy system but that something had to be done to maintain credible newspapers at the local level. Where do you think of both of their sentiments, these thoughts and these sort of proposals?

MC: Well I understand the motivation for them. The dilemma with being in an industry that is so rapidly changing is the last place I would like to be is on an island. In other words, the fact that Scripps owns 13 papers means that we can take some good ideas on the internet for example and redistribute them very quickly 13 different times. If you were sitting on an island alone whether it's Los Angeles or pick another big market that would be prone to this Chandler argument and you didn't have the ability to continue to invest in innovation which would be very difficult to do on a one off basis, that would be a very lonely island to live on in this next several year period time when we're trying to reinvent ourselves. So you know newspapers still are incredibly important to most communities. The reason I got into the business was because I worked for Paul Simon from Illinois. 

BM: Sure, he's a legend around here.

MC: Yeah, absolutely. He told me one night at dinner, I love being senator but I made much more of a difference as a weekly newspaper publisher in Troy, Illinois. And I've never forgotten that. And that's true in Troy, it's true in St. Louis, it's true in Chicago, it doesn't matter where you are, the newspaper is still an important institution in all the markets we operate in. Our challenge really is to change the wheels on the tires as we're going down the highway. And it's a very difficult dilemma. But I don't think...

BM: Is this sort of an updated version of changing horses in midstream?

MC: Exactly. But I don't think that the Chandler argument about having a benevolent millionaire owning a paper, a one off newspaper in a single market is a great place to be particularly when you can't take advantage of developments in innovations...

BM:I do think in fairness to Chandler, he was talking more of the Greenbay Packer structure, to have like 50,000 people each own one share. The ownership would be so diffuse and local that it would in effect operate as a community institution and get all sorts of benefits as a result.

MC: Well, I think in Champagne Urbana you have that, right?

BM: Well, we have something similar to that, that's right. And you know we only have time for one more caller and I want to get someone who's been waiting patiently so let's go to that call right now. From Bloomington, Illinois line 4 you're one the air with Mark Contreras.

Line 4: Yeah, hi Bob and thank you for a great program. I listen every week or as often as I can.

BM: Well, thank you. 

Line 4: The lady that called from Charleston, I agree. I would hate to lose a newspaper. There's something so sensory about a newspaper in contrast to the internet. I just wondered what the future was. You had a mentioned it a couple of times in different ways and I did miss a couple of things you said. I think you said in 10 years we'll still have a newspaper.

BM: Thank you very much caller. Mark?

MC: When I was working at Pulitzer in St. Louis we bought the Pantagraph in Bloomington and I've very familiar with Bloomington and that newspaper. I have great confidence although I've not been familiar with it for the last five years or so, I have great confidence that the Pantagraph will still be alive and well five years from now.

BM: You know I hear the band tuning up in the background, Mark, which means our hour has come to a very rapid close. I want to thank you so much for taking an hour out of your Sunday out of what I trust will be your leisure time today to join us here at WILL. It's been an honor to have you here as our guest.

MC: Really enjoyed it.

BM: Good luck with your work. My name is Bob McChesney. You've been listening to Media Matters. I want to thank Melisse Trenz, my producer, Kyle Kroha for working the board. And we'll be back in 167 hours. All of you have a great week. Bye bye.