The writing has been on the wall or, more accurately, on the digital screen for years.
On Jan. 1, Salt Lake City will become yet another American city without a daily print newspaper.
The Salt Lake Tribune will be online-only six days a week, with a print edition Sunday. The LDS Church-owned Deseret News will also move online daily, with a single weekly print edition and a monthly magazine.
In 2012, University of Southern California journalism professor Jeffrey Cole boldly predicted that “almost all” print newspapers in the United States would be extinct in five years. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, was not far wrong.
According to University of North Carolina media business analyst Penelope Muse Abernathy, in just the past three years more than 300 print newspapers have closed, eliminating 6,000 reporters and editors’ jobs and dropping print newspaper circulation by more than 5 million.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the decline of print, as dozens of papers either closed shop or — like The Tribune and Deseret News — converted to a mostly online format as print subscriptions fell precipitously.
The reasons for this dramatic change are the collapse of the business model that once sustained print newspapers and, more importantly, the growth of the internet as most people’s principal source of news. Printing a daily newspaper is an enormously expensive enterprise. Press and distribution costs alone eat up two-thirds of most newspapers’ budgets. Without robust display and classified advertising to subsidize the newsgathering, the system no longer works.
What that means for Salt Lake City’s long history of varied and lively print journalism is still unclear, particularly if former readers fail to make the digital turn.
In 1920, with a population of only 118,000, Salt Lake City boasted five daily newspapers as well as dozens of lively weeklies, including the African American Broad Ax and a number of foreign-language publications. But by 1952, when the afternoon Salt Lake Telegram folded, only The Tribune and Deseret News remained.
With the rise of the internet, social media and usually free online news aggregations, the demand for paper editions ebbed. Even before the Jan. 1 conversion to mostly digital, both surviving Salt Lake City dailies already had many more online readers than print subscribers.
But it still represents a milestone moment in our history.
Digitalization still represents a potentially disruptive event for many of us — especially older people — who appreciate the tactile pleasure of a daily paper that sociologist Marshall McLuhan compared to slipping into a hot bath. According to McLuhan and others, newspaper subscribers didn’t just read papers, they experienced them and counted on them, like the rising and the setting of the sun, as a quotidian pacemaker.
Long gone are the days when newspapers competed to record even the smallest events. A detailed article in the 1916 Salt Lake Herald-Republican, for example, reported that my grandmother wore a “bridal gown of white satin with trimmings of silver lace and pearls” when she married my grandfather as the Hawaiian Orchestra played the Lohengrin bridal chorus in Garfield, a copper mining suburb that, like the newspaper, no longer exists.
A 1950 article in the afternoon Salt Lake Telegram reported that my second-cousin Richard Tempest pitched a one-hitter in the Telegram-Parks Kids League, but still lost 8-5 because he gave up too many walks.
So much of that detail is gone. What remains, however, is still very important to maintaining an informed community. Despite severe cutbacks in staff, both the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune — arguably the best daily newspaper in the Mountain West — and the Deseret News, known for its outstanding environmental coverage, are excellent news providers and government watchdogs. The city is lucky to have them.
The changes will require all of us to reconsider our part in supporting and funding news institutions. The days of paying for a single subscription and adding a Christmas tip for the delivery kid are over. The business model built on advertising has been shattered and the relative pennies made from online advertising will never bridge the gap.
The first step to keeping your local newspaper is the most obvious: subscribe. Buy an online subscription or a combination online-and-Sunday-print edition.
For those who can afford it, support also may mean contributing directly to your newspaper in the same way that you give to your public radio and public television broadcasters. In order to attract this kind of financial support, The Salt Lake Tribune took the extraordinary step of becoming a nonprofit corporation so that it can seek tax-deductible charitable donations.
In other cases, shoring up your local newspaper includes contributing to one of the nonprofit news organizations that provide resources, reporting, and content to help fill the gaps left by the decline in traditional newspaper revenue.
The Tribune benefits from collaborations with several of these nonprofits. The nonprofit Report for America, for example, pays half the salary of the excellent Tribune reporter Zak Podmore, who covers southeastern Utah from his base in San Juan County. The nonprofit Salt Lake-based Utah Investigative Journalism Project (I’m on its board of directors) regularly collaborates with The Tribune, Deseret News and other newspapers on investigative stories. The Tribune also participates in the nonprofit NewsMatch fundraising effort, and benefits from its membership the Institute for Nonprofit News.
Finally, there is the most nagging question of all: How do you convince someone who gets free internet that newspapers, online or print, are still relevant and not just a relic?
Perhaps the most aggressive attempt to add new subscribers is the effort by Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the family-owned Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock. Not only did Hussman convert his paper to mostly online in 2019, he also gave subscribers free iPads to read the digital product and sent teams of “trainers” to show readers how to use them. Like The Tribune, Hussman continues to publish a print Sunday edition, but so far he has been able to maintain his reader base and full newsroom staff without cutting subscription rates.
These kind of creative innovations, said UNC’s Abernathy, offer hope as we attempt to adapt to a changing media world — particularly in reaching what she calls “news deserts” across the American landscape.
“Hussman hired 70 people to go into these communities and they would rent out the Holiday Inn and show them how to use an iPad, how to get the most value out of them,” Abernathy wrote. “In his first year he was running at between 85% and 101% conversion to digital. So, he was actually picking up people in some places that he hadn’t before.”
Rone Tempest
Rone Tempest (ronetempest.com) is a writer and former national and foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who now lives in Salt Lake City.
