Another 40 on the road to oblivion

I couldn’t even begin to imagine closing down a newspaper with a circulation of twenty-two thousand subscribers in the immediate greater Portland area, but that is what occurred on February 1, 1991 when the Evening Express left the local media machine for good under the headline “Goodbye.”

Circulation was on the decrease, it was argued. Why publish a hyper-local paper when the Express’ sister publication, the Press Herald, was publishing a state-wide paper with a reach from Kittery straight on up to Bangor? Better, they could merge the Express newsroom into one and put out a product that was all things to all subscribers, and save a little money in the meantime.

The Express was a relic of turn-of-the-twentieth century newspapering that occurred in cities across the country. Then, cities of all sizes were host to multiple daily newspapers representing a whole spectrum of views. The Press Herald itself is the result of a merger between the Portland Press and the Herald Advertiser.

Hyper-local papers: Our past, our future.

I believe the newspaper industry, as well as the economy in general is returning to the local ideology of those earlier times. In decline since 2007, the large regional newspaper model has told its own story in a slew of dismal headlines. Yesterday’s announcement that the Press Herald was eliminating 40 jobs was no exception. It’s truly a shame and didn’t need to happen.

Just like the current downturn we’re experiencing as a nation, the downturn in the newspaper industry started as far back as thirty years ago. Decisions that took what were local, sustainable papers and turned them into the infinite growth machines they became by expanding their reach both geographically and editorially have plateaued. First came the geographic expansions of the 1970s. Papers would go further and further away from their home bases, adding motor routes to service new subscribers until they were as far as they could go and be deliverable by seven in the morning. Soon, regional distribution centers were opened across the paper’s new regions to centralize the management of all the new routes.

A few years after the routes were established, the editorial expansions began. Former local, but now regional newspapers opened bureau after bureau and staffed them with reporters and support personnel. Indeed, some of the best local reporting came out of regional newspapers in the 80’s and 90’s. Sure, the papers had lost focus on their original urban cores, but the honey pot was where the mall was, proof of which is on display here locally on Spring Street in SoPo, where in 1989 the Press Herald built its cavernous printing facility with the intention of moving their entire operation there. The city of Portland somehow convinced them not to abandon their downtown offices, however. The paper remained there until just last year. The South Portland facility sits largely unused to this day.

All of these decisions served the infinite growth beast that until 2008 was our economy. The expansions served to increase ad sales and subscriber growth right up until the best year regional newspapers will ever experience with regard to revenue came and went, 2006.

Then the e-brake was applied to the idea of infinite growth, and with it a whole slew of other industries. Papers that had grown ten-fold in a relatively short amount of time were forced to cut back dramatically. They did so in the exact opposite direction they grew. First the bureaus were closed and editorial staff members were laid off.

Then came the catch-22. I was sitting in my car in a parking lot in Bangor at 1:30 in the morning on a Sunday four years ago waiting for the truck carrying the Sunday Telegram to arrive after having lost a coin toss to cover for the vacationing Bangor area circulation manager. The truck arrived, carrying 700 papers that were to be handed out to twenty-five different carriers for delivery. The routes that originated from that parking lot stretched from Bar Harbor all the way to Houlton.

I sat there and just shook my head thinking about the average revenue of $1.25 per paper versus what we were forced to compensate the carriers, which at the time was an average of nearly two dollars. I would return to the Press Herald building armed with Power Points explaining why these routes needed to end, if for anything else to stop the bleeding of red ink. But we couldn’t stop them. The paper had grown too big. We needed every bit of circulation we could scrape together, to continue to charge the ad rates that supported the operation. Even as subscribers disappeared from routes, we would still have to deliver them, I was told.

Now, carriers on rural routes at regional papers across the country are being compensated to deliver newspapers at rates that exceed revenue even closer to their cores as their own coverage cutbacks and internet competition for regional and state news eats away at subscriber bases. Add to that the ever increasing cost of fuel to transport long distances, and you have a recipe for disaster. The mistakes, decisions and big dreams of the baby-boomer newspapermen have come crashing down around them, and they still haven’t come to terms with the new reality that is on the horizon for newspapers, industry and the economy in general best stated by author James Howard Kunstler in this paper Tuesday: “to contract, de-globalize, downscale, and go local.”

So the layoffs at large regional newspapers, including the one in our own backyard, will continue. The times that allowed for anything in our economy that was large in scale are drawing to an abrupt close. I wonder now after the inevitable closure of some of the larger papers, if executives will be able to look back and see how things might have been different if they maintained their original turn of the twentieth century local sustainable model? Things would certainly be different.

You might even be reading the Express right now.