A not quite to scale depiction of the changing state of Alaska’s largest news gathering organization/ADN graphic
Alaska’s largest news organization downsizes
After three months of denying plans to reduce the local newspaper to a two-day per week publication, the Anchorage Daily News officially announced the change today in a statement that began with the claim that “we depend on the trust and support of our readers.”
Apparently owner Ryan Binkley lacked an editor to read the statement and explain it was tone-deaf, or the newspaper lacked an editor with the courage to tell the boss that proclaiming your trustworthiness after months of dissembling on the subject of newsprint shrinkage doesn’t look good.
Repeated phone calls to the ADN circulation department since Must Read Alaska first reported this pending shift back on April 11 solicited various convoluted and vague explanations as to how what was announced today was unlikely to happen along with vague promises the newspaper always gives its subscribers what they want.
Meanwhile, the planned transition went unreported by the newspaper itself in a continuation of the sort of reporting that happened when the ADN was owned by now-discredited, former publisher Alice Rogoff.
Reporters and editors at the newspaper, which the then-wife of billionaire David Rubenstein bought for $34 million in 2014 and renamed the Alaska Dispatch News (ADN), first ignored the crumbling finances of the state’s largest news gathering operation as its losses mounted in 2016 and then in 2017 reported those financial problems as the normal struggles all businesses go through.
Not long after the ADN finally reported even that much, Rogoff took the paper into bankruptcy.
The Binkleys picked it up cheap to save it, but left in charge as editor David Hulen, who’d been the number two at the newspaper when it missed the negotiations going on between the McClatchy Company and Rogoff that led to the sale of the then-Daily News and either missed or to chose to overlook the paper’s financial problems as Rogoff marched the ADN toward financial ruin.
Both stories were then among the biggest business news in the state. The latest news not so much.
Downsizing of printed newspapers has been the norm for a decade, and The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University last year reported the downward spiral is accelerating.
In Alaska, the Juneau Empire, the state’s capital city newspaper, went to two days per week in May of last year. The Peninsula Clarion, the voice of the Kenai Peninsula, made the same move at about the same time.
How long that will last is anyone’s guess. Newspapers are expensive to print and now must battle online competition from established television news organizations, new online news entities and social media in a marketplace where many can play without need for much of an investment.
Given the nature of the battlefield, it was clearly inevitable the ADN would be forced to downsize no matter how much the organization insisted otherwise.
As Binkley confessed in his missive, “print readership makes up just 7 percent of our total audience across our platforms. We have to focus our efforts on where most of our readers are.”
How long the two-day print schedule will last is also anyone’s guess. The ADN, which once had a Sunday circulation approaching 100,000 readers, was down to 19,000 print subscribers when the Binkleys made the latest decision.
And the reduction to two days per week – one on Wednesday and the other on Sunday – is likely to encourage more to leave. The Wednesday paper was retained because it carries supermarket advertising that is still a moneymaker for the newspaper, but that marketing has increasingly been going direct to the consumer.
It’s now easy for potential shoppers to print out any ads they want from the comfort of a chair behind their computer, and many are pushed those ads in their email.
A lot has changed in the 32 years since Anchorage witnessed the end of one of the country’s last great newspaper wars with the upstart Anchorage Daily News buying out the Anchorage Times, once the voice of Alaska.
ADN journalists were then celebrating the rise of a journalistic institution they were sure would rule the news in the north forever. It lasted barely two decades, less than half the time for which the Times had reigned.
And despite the valiant efforts of the Binkleys to save the brand, it has been slowly but steadily decaying since they took ownership. Not because of anything they did, but because markets changed and the revenue most online news organizations generate these days is not big enough to pay for large and highly capable reporting staff.
Many of the latter have left for the higher-paying world of public relations, and many of the best who study journalism at university to directly to PR instead of a news operation.
According to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers, the 291,700 Americans employed as public relations operatives a year ago outnumbered journalists to the tune of five to one, and the ratio in favor PR folk is probably even greater now.
The BLS predicted a 6 percent growth rate for PR operatives going into the end of 2023 and the start of 2024 while the journalism job market was expected to shrink by another 3 percent. Suffice it to say, there are now far more people out there spoon-feeding the “news” to the people who supposedly report the news than there are people actually reporting the news.
The mainstream media, along with much other media, is now often little more than a distribution service for PR, which has become so emboldened it thinks it can sell almost anything.
It’s a brave new world.
They only need a print edition when the grocery stores (also now disappearing, despite more mouths to feed) pay them to distribute weekly ads. Newspapers don’t exist to publish news. They exist to sell ads……….and spread political, ideological, and social (and did I mention commercial?) propaganda.
I’m a subscriber of the print edition. When I inquired about the cost reduction for only two days per week delivery, I was told there would be no change in the monthly charge. I chose to end my subscription. Maybe one reason there are fewer subscribers for the print edition is the $3.00 per paper fee. I must admit, part of the perk for the paper was for fire starter. I did enjoy burning the liberal rag it is and has always been.
“……..I must admit, part of the perk for the paper was for fire starter……..”
Fire start print will always be delivered, Tom. Free. Fourth class mail, courtesy of the USPS will never end. You can’t stop it if you tried. Even junk email can’t seem to stem the flow. In fact, join AAA Auto Club for the great towing benefits, especially for RV breakdowns in Alaska, where heavy tows can be hundreds of miles. You will then get so much junk insurance offers by mail that you’ll never need ADN print again to ignite your winter wood stove.
Yes, but some of that doesn’t burn so well. When my shop was heated with a wood burning stove, we subscribed to the Sunday NYT in part becuase it was great fire starter. And sometimes while starting the fire, I’d even find a really interesting story stuffed away somewhere deep inside that paper.
Thanks for the update Craig. I can only wounder why ADN would need a full daily print newspaper, when the only report half the news. FYI i don’t think the ADN has any journalists.