Shifting Landscape For Lone Star Newspapers

The last of the great Texas newspaper wars is finally over.

First, cross-town newspapers in “two newspaper towns” wrestled over major markets like Dallas and Houston for years; once the local competition folded, newspapers across the state began jousting over state politics, natural disasters and prestigious awards. And then, several weeks ago, editors from Texas’ “Big 5″ publications agreed to share front page plans and news outlines, as well as occasional access to news articles and features.

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In past years, high-profile investigations were designed to scoop the competition; these days, summaries are shared every afternoon, along with broad plans for the following morning’s front page. Editors can choose to keep the articles themselves, so it’s far from total access, but it’s still a big change for journalists raised on rivalry. Editors say will cut costs and improve news quality, even if it marks the end of an era.

The newspaper war of today, they argue, isn’t about editorial dominance or regional rivalry. It’s a fight to stay alive as an industry – and one they say they’re winning, at least here in Texas.

“We come in every day here, I think, girded for battle,” said Bob Rivard, editor and executive vice president of the San Antonio Express-News. “Let’s defend what we’ve built, let’s preserve it, let’s convince the community with yet more good journalism that we’re essential to the community, and that we’re not going anywhere.”

Behind the Headlines: Texas Newspapers and the National Economy

Newspapers across the country are dealing with three difficult issues. One relates to an evolving media market and changing consumer habits, thanks to the Internet and younger generations entering the workforce; another is tied to the suffering economy, which is placing pressure on advertisers and readers. The third, Rivard and other editors said, is a common assumption that newspapers everywhere are under the same degree of stress – which is unfair, given the relatively healthy state of the Texas economy.

Over the last several months, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News cut home delivery to only two days a week, while corporate owners of the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe are grappling with their own financial worries. And in March, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer folded its print version and went exclusively online, while the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo. closed its doors entirely. Their difficulties captured headlines, but not fair comparisons.

Since the Texas economy had no dramatic boom several years ago, the bust that crippled California and Florida never came; that means a more stable advertising base for newspapers, and healthier publications. There are few major unions in Texas, so the labor negotiations stinging the Boston Globe are not an issue, and only one of the state’s major newspapers – the Fort Worth Star-Telegram – is owned by a company in crippling debt. And the Rocky and P-I were among the last newspapers to share markets with cross-town publications, and survived through advertising and sharing arrangements that expired shortly before the Rocky folded and the P-I went online-only. Texas, by contrast, lost its last two-newspaper town when the Houston Post was purchased and closed fourteen years ago.

By comparison, Texas editors say, the future looks a bit brighter down here. But that’s not to say they aren’t facing serious challenges.

The Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News each had major layoffs last spring – to the tune of one in three staffers for the E-N, while the DMN required surviving employees to face budgetary bells and whistles like parking fees and reduced cell phone coverage. The Chronicle gutted most of its writers at the Chronicle/Express-News combined Austin bureau in the middle of a legislative session, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram closed its Capitol office before the session even began. The Austin American-Statesman was on sale for nearly a year before its owners took it off the market, as part of a major sale by Cox Newspapers, Inc. that also saw the Waco Tribune-Herald and two of East Texas’ major publications – the Lufkin Daily News and Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel – change hands only recently.

Those kinds of numbers have a real impact on newspapers, in Texas and throughout the country. For better or worse, remaining reporters and editors are expected to do more with less, and it’s unclear how successful they will be.

But editors say the economy in the Lone Star State gives them some breathing room that they wouldn’t have in other parts of the country, and that there’s little most companies can do to shape the national economy. But in Texas, they have space to tackle the challenge they do have some control over – adjusting traditional newspapers to fit in a digital world.

The Future of Texas Newspapers: Caught in the Web, or Spinning it Themselves?

It’s become cliche, in 2009, to say that the World Wide Web has changed the way that Americans receive and perceive news content. But online revenue has not evolved at the same lightning-fast pace as online content, which is big news for content providers like newspapers.

Online readers, many of them young, often believe that information should be free – and news aggregation sites like the Huffington Post and Breaking News Online can bring users free news from around the Internet at web-speed. Rapid online diversification by news organizations and bloggers has compounded revenue challenges leading many to chase shallow revenue from “banner ads” and other online advertising. Overall online readers pull in less revenue than print readers – newspapers are searching for new ways to generate cash with their content.

“I think the daily market across the nation is struggling with trying to find a new business model that works,” said Michael Hodges, executive director of the Texas Press Association. “That’s not to say that they’re going to go away – newspapers have always been the original content providers, and they’re always going to be the content providers. We just don’t know what that’s going to look like further on down the road.”

Ultimately, Hodges and some editors said, the future for newspapers may resemble – of all things – iTunes. Readers could agree to download or access a particular article for, say, a dime or a nickel, or subscribe to an entire issue for a quarter a day. The formula has worked well for online music, which was pirated and penniless in the days of Napster and Kazaa, but no one has worked out the software for newspapers yet.

In the meantime, newspapers are experimenting with different techniques to raise readership and revenue. The Express-News plans to raise its prices, and Rivard said they made a “big mistake” by keeping prices set at a time when costs for almost every other product climbed in the recession. Other newspapers have already raised their subscription costs and over-the-counter prices.

The Morning News has expanded its presence in the blogosphere, introducing neighborhood blogs for all of “The Big D’s” various suburbs and exurbs just after their last round of layoffs. They also introduced a transportation blog to compliment their existing political blogs, as well as a “Cowboys Insider” blog to present the upcoming NFL season through the eyes of a Dallas Cowboys tight end.

The Austin American-Statesman is promoting its printing press as a community resource, and recently began publishing the University of Texas’ Daily Texan to save the university the cost of operating its own printing equipment. It also recently completed a $36 million production facility on Congress Avenue that will help send targeted advertising to specific neighborhoods, rather than bulk ads to the entire city, which could help boost revenue while building advertising bonds to the paper.

Then there’s the front page sharing deal, which has already seen headlines and articles expand beyond their original publication. There’s also been talk among the same publications of combining real estate in Austin and sharing a common Capitol bureau, although there are still mixed feelings about that idea.

The same group has also agreed to pool efforts for Big XII sports coverage, long considered the Holy Grail of Texas sports.

They’ve agreed to share content with each other, as well as the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, the Waco Tribune-Herald and a pair of newspapers in Oklahoma, that will allow them to piggyback on shared coverage of smaller games while freeing resources to spend individually on bigger games. They may all share a story on the relatively low-key UT-Baylor football game, for example, while each sending their own staff to cover the high-profile showdown between UT and Texas Tech.

Each of those efforts is designed to either cut costs or expand their online appeal to specific audiences, all while keeping the traditional focus on professional journalism. And there’s little talk of reducing circulation days, and no consideration at all of abandoning the print version entirely. Those plans are set against a growing number of online news outlets in Texas, including a group that covers Capitol politics and a number of regional and county-based Web sites. There’s also a soon-to-be-launched online initiative called the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit Web site hoping to bring political news to a statewide audience. The start-up is using millions raised and donated by John Thornton, an Austin-based venture capitalist and longtime Democratic supporter, to peel high-profile journalists away from Texas Monthly, the Dallas Morning News and the El Paso Times, to name a few. But such sites provide a very different product than daily newspapers, and a very different business model.

Many in the blogosphere and alternative media also perennially prophesie doom and gloom for daily newspapers, which newspaper editors and industry experts say is unfair. Hodges is fond of applying the Mark Twain quote that “Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated,” and others have their own responses.

But regardless, changes in the newspaper industry are focused on diversification and logistical efficiency, and are often departures from the traditional New York Times moniker of “all the news that’s fit to print.”

“The world has changed, and no longer is at all things for all people kind of world,” said Michael Vivio, publisher of the Austin American-Statesman. “It’s no different from the big department store that’s become specialty stores or gone online. The point is, people are still shopping.”

Off the Beaten Path: Small Towns, Big Journalism

The vast majority of Texas newspapers hardly ever make the headlines, though, and they’re doing quite well, thank you. Of the about 80 daily newspapers in Texas, only nine circulate more than 45,000 copies a weekday – and most clock in at under 10,000 copies. And that’s not even counting the hundreds of weekly papers circulating throughout suburbs and rural communities that make up the “vast majority” of Texas newspapers, according to Hodges.

Metropolitan publications serve areas with dense competition and diverse populations, both of which complicate their efforts to weather the current economic storm. But most small towns have neither, often working in communities without any rivals at all – in short, providing the kind of exclusive coverage that big-city papers have not seen in decades.

That means more advertising, and from a higher number of customers. That means the ability to “turn on a dime,” according to Wanda Cash, former editor and publisher of the Baytown Sun and a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. And it means a greater connection to local readers, which provides a degree of insulation from the troubled economy.

It can also potentially lead to a more efficient business model, since those advertising revenues are spread out over a smaller staff – especially for weekly publications, which typically need only a few hands on deck. That stability can be a major advantage in this economic climate, especially for younger generations stepping into the fray.

“Here’s what I tell my journalism students, who are terrified about the job market,” Cash said. “I remind them that in tribal societies, the storyteller was the respected member of the tribe, because people always want stories. We don’t know whether we’ll be sitting around a fire or podcasting it, who knows, but journalists will always be in demand.”

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