Black + White + Red: Why I’m Cancelling Our Newspaper Subscriptions

In: Minnesota|business strategy|media|social trends

4 Aug 2009

My first job more than 25 years ago was on the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. I was hired as the Sports Editor of the Mesabi Daily News, in the town of Virginia, for $150 a week. ($111.62 net, a number burned into my brain.)

I grew up in the age of New Journalism. Writers like Tom Wolfe and Gay Telese not only pioneered a new, more intimate form of narrative, they also became heroes to kids like me who wanted to write, and later wanted to write for a living. These guys were very cool, cool in a new way that was compelling and a challenge to understand all in one. I remember reading The Right Stuff and wondering how in the world Tom Wolfe managed to pull all of this together in his brain.

I believed then, as I do now, that sports writing can deliver some of the most powerful, poingnant, insights into our culture and ourselves. Writers like Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated and Roger Angell and John Updike in the New Yorker have written stories I think are worthy of Proust. I still believe that sports is an empty vessel into which we pour athletes and hold them up to the light to examine the ambiguities and nuances of human as they play their games on their decisive, and sometimes arbitrary, playing fields. The best sports writing can offer a very clear view into the human soul.

I wrote for seven years, until the Minneapolis Star went out of business and the free-lance writing gigs dried up. Then I went back to grad school at USC in Los Angeles, just as the World Wide Web was starting up in 1990, and through luck and work I’ve been an interactive something or other ever since.

I returned to the newspaper business briefly from 2000 to 2003, when a former client, Dan Finnigan, hired me as a Senior Vice President at Knight Ridder Newspapers in San Jose, running product strategy. We discovered quickly that we were at the beginning of the end of the daily newspaper in American life. Privately-commissioned research that showed 18-30 year olds were adopting the newspaper reading habit at less than half the rate of the previous generation. And this was long before the rise of Web 2.0 and social media.

I left Knight Ridder and since 2003 I’ve been working as a strategic consultant in interactive, specializing in how the user experience is research, analyzed, designed and operated. My wife and two daughters and I now live in Minneapolis.

We still get three daily newspapers on our front doorstep each day—the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Each morning when I’m home I spread them out on the kitchen table with my morning coffee and spend half an hour reading. This is how the day begins. Even on the road, my standing request with room service at a hotel is for the local daily newspaper in the morning.

I’ve read at least one or two daily newspapers at the breakfast table since I was about 8 years old. The daily newspaper was a part of my parents ritual, especially my mother Betty, who always did the Crypto-Quip in the entertainment section. As we moved around the country we read the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily American, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. We had our favorite columnists and our favorite news stories. For many years, even after I left home, a daily ritual was to read Mark Trail in the comics. We would call each other and hoot and howl when a new bad guy showed up (They always smoked cigarettes, unless they were the boss of the gang, who always smoked a cigar.)

Daily newspaper readership peaked in the late 1980s after steady growth throughout the 20^th century. It’s interesting to see that the biggest rise in daily newspaper subscriptions came in the late 1930s, as the US economy was recovering. You see, the newspaper became something of a status symbol for America’s working class. It was a sign that you had achieved the essentials of the American Dream: a decent job, a home, a car, and Mom working as a housewife. Even if it was a not badge of affluence, it was self-assurance that you were no longer a goon who made a living by the strength of your back.

There was another spurt in newspaper circulation growth right after World War II, as the US entered a 25 year generation of affluence. Around this time, when television also arrived, that the daily newspaper became enshrined as one of the four pillars of marketing—broadcast, outdoor, magazines and newspapers.

But since 1972 newspaper readership has been in steady decline, not only in percentages of people who reads newspapers, but in the actual raw circulation numbers themselves.

And today I’m writing to say we’re cancelling the Wall Street Journal, and the weekday Minneapolis Star New York Times. (A small compromise–what literate person in the United States could give up reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times?)

The reason is were canceling the daily newspapers is that most days now all three lie in a pile by the front door, wrapped in colored plastic, unread. I, like you, am getting much more of my news online, almost in real time. For in-depth reading, I’d frankly rather clear time to read the New Yorker and Sports Illustrated each week than open up one of the forlorn daily newspapers lying on the front hall rug.

We just can’t justify $500 or even $250 a year for the paper edition of these three newspapers. My mix of media resources has changed, and my reading habits have changed—and all for the better I think. Even I, maybe especially I, find news in the brand new ways.

And believe me, I understand that the Miller household cancellations are just another tiny piece of the sustainable business model chipped away from local and national newspapers. I get that, probably better than most of you do. I still have a lot of friends in the business.

I’ve written earlier about how daily newspapers might survive for another 10-15 years. Ultimately the paper product is a business model whose day has come and gone. Inefficient and bad for the environment in so many ways, the paper product will die off soon. The next ten years in the newspaper business is going to get very ugly.

Newspaper people I know understand that they’re in the news business, not the paper business. But there’s not a reliable way to pay for the news operation if the product goes online. That’s not because online advertising pays poorly—it does, but that will change with time. It’s because newspapers for a century enjoyed a kind of monopoly in one area of the media mix, on classified and display advertising for jobs, stores and products. That monopoly allowed them to charge $500 for a tiny classified ad, of which $400 was pure profit. That monopoly will never come back, no matter what’s done to improve the paper product.

So it’s the passing of a milestone for me, as I make the phone calls to cancel.

Anyway, we’ll still get the paper product on Sundays. Claire will grab the Style section, and I’ll take the Sports. Ingrid, our 13 year old teen-ager, will grab the Comics. We’ll read at the breakfast table and eventually one of us will laugh out loud or hoot derisively at something. And then we’ll share.

And then Lucia–our precocious, self-confident 8 year old–will ask if she can go on the computer now.