Mini-round of layoffs at The Dallas Morning News

The answer to your latter question is that the market has been gutted. Given the population growth and the size of the Dallas market the company has trouble breaking even.

One reason I am so pessimistic is that I read the transcript of a recent New Media Investment Group, a.k.a. Gatehouse, earnings call. Traditionally Gatehouse had concentrated on buying smaller papers but in the past year they have purchased papers in larger markets such as Akron, Oklahoma City, Palm Beach and Austin. An analyst asked about this change in strategy. Management said that that they are having trouble finding small newspapers with enough revenue to buy so they needed to buy bigger ones. If a vampire like Gatehouse can not find enough blood out of a paper to make the purchase worthwhile I suggest the end is getting near for some papers.

 

No. The people who live in local communities do not, by and large, care about their local communities. They care about national politics, Trump, that drama, etc. The neighbor down the street? Who's that? But they'll read every Trump tweet all day.

 

What monopoly? On local news? Most people think they get enough from their local TV stations or their websites. And newspapers never made their profits from subscription costs. They made it from ad sales. When the Internet and the ensuing growth of social media meant companies could reach potential customers more directly at a much lower cost, they weren't coming back. Real estate ads and car dealer ads used to make daily Classified sections huge, and a lot of papers would have a separate Classified section just for job listings on Sundays. Now almost all of that is done online, and newspapers are picking up the scraps.

There's nowhere in America where newspapers have a monopoly that means anything, and we've done a poor job keeping up with the competition. Heck, most of the news industry has, really. The model is broke.

 

Yeah, I think if you're a homeowner - someone already invested in the community - newspaper provide local coverage in a way that TV can't. The nuts and bolts of town government, like the school board, that affect you directly. (Or you believe affect you directly. Sometimes, I've had friends tell me, it seems like everything in politics boils down to what it'll ever possibly do to your property taxes.)

I guess it's really a matter of opinion. Even as someone who left the United States a long time (good riddance seemed to be the sentiment of those left behind,) I can't believe that most of our towns have become so atomized that local news doesn't matter.

 

I absolutely agree newspapers provide local coverage in a way TV can't, but I can tell you for the average American these days, homeowner or not, they just don't care. They don't realize how much of TV news was in the paper the day or two before and that without the paper, those stories go unreported (not to say local TV stations never break news, but newspapers generally have larger staff even these days and can cover more). Most think what they get from TV or from what they hear from friends (even if it's wrong half the time) is good enough. And, hey, that's free, and no one thinks they should have to pay for news after we built a system that delivered it to them first for cheap in print and then for free online for way too long.

 

Nice to do that during the season. Wonder how they are going to handle that the next few months.

They were looking for an SMU writer in early August and then just decided not to fill the position, moving Gerry Fraley to handle it.

 

So sad. Often people will look for logic in the decisions and there really isn’t any beyond offloading salary and benefits and covering it with young freelancers who will work for peanuts because they want to be in the field.