Meet the New Press

Journalism, of course, is dying. Ask anybody. Newspapers—the institutional bedrock of American journalism—shed 2,400 full-time reporting jobs in 2007, roughly 5 percent of the newsroom workforce. The final number for 2008 is expected to be around 4,000, with increasingly steep losses predicted into the foreseeable future. (A heavy spate of year-end staff reductions around the country threatens to drive 2008 newsroom losses much higher than anticipated.) The growing wave of layoffs and buyouts is the result of what newspaper managers call a “broken business model” and a trail of highly leveraged ownership switches that have left many urban dailies swamped with debt. The fortunate few unburdened by excessive debt are beholden to impatient shareholders demanding higher returns when none are in the offing. It is hard, frankly, to imagine a business model in which a product with rising costs and diminishing revenues ever again becomes a going concern. Which is another way of saying that the problem with newspapers is structural—that they are now a strictly bad to worse proposition. In 2007, print advertising revenue dropped 10 percent. Last year’s figure could end up as high as 14 percent, with the coming years sure to be increasingly dire. Circulation? Down among most metropolitan dailies, especially on Sundays, a once-reliable money-maker. Last October, the venerable Christian Science Monitor announced it would move online and cease publishing a print edition after 100 years in the business.

All these problems have landed right here in the Twin Cities, where the two daily newspapers seem to be racing each other toward the grave. The problems are particularly stark at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where, despite staff reductions, the current owner, Avista Capital Management, has defaulted on the debt it took on to purchase the paper two years ago. Last fall, Minnpost.com media columnist David Brauer estimated the value of the Star Tribune at $125 million—a fraction of the $530 million Avista paid for the paper two years ago. More recently, Brauer told me his estimate might really be more like a guess because it’s unclear whether there’s any rational market for newspapers at all. The Star Tribune could in any case be bought for pennies on the dollars that have been sunk into it. Bankruptcy, merger, or simply going out of business are all in the realm of possibility for the paper.

What happened? Everybody knows the answer to that one too. Content—the news—has fled to the 24-7 world of cable television and the Internet, where a dizzying profusion of online media and blogs—plus a handful of national newspapers—are now only a click away anytime, anywhere. Same thing for revenue, though in their move onto the Web certain categories of advertising have been spectacularly decoupled from content. There’s no news on CraigsList.

The physical evidence of all this arrives on our doorsteps in stark black-and-white every day. Newspapers are shrinking before our eyes, getting smaller and thinner, threatening to vanish altogether. But is the death of journalism killing journalism school? Nope. Crazily, it’s just the opposite. The same forces inimical to the American newspaper are producing a bumper crop of would-be journalists. The University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication—my alma mater—is the only unit in the College of Liberal Arts with its own admissions review. The school turns away one in four applicants—not to keep students out, but merely to stay at a manageable size. Enrollment, currently at about 1,100 undergraduates, is maxed—and has been for years. Journalism is the most popular liberal arts major.

Last fall, I spent a few weeks revisiting Murphy Hall, the East Bank home base for the journalism school. It was like looking ahead and back in time simultaneously. Journalism may be in flux, its future in peril, but it has always been thus. My generation was warned that evening newspapers would die. They did.

Vadim Lavrusik says he really isn’t interested in working for a newspaper. “My dream job would be to work for an online news source,” says Lavrusik. He says he’d be thrilled to work for a site like Politico.com or the local Minnpost.com and that the lessons he’s learning in journalism school are “still going to apply.” Journalism isn’t really dying, Lavrusik tells me, it’s only evolving. Lavrusik sees a future in which the daily newspaper is actually a weekly in print, with daily stories posted continuously online. Other forms, he says, will narrow their focus to occupy specialized niches covering politics or business or sports or the arts—everything—without the artifice of neutrality. “I think we’ll move away from fairness and objectivity as the central paradigm,” says Lavrusik.

Whoa.

“Our generation is pretty optimistic,” Lavrusik says. “The public still wants storytelling, and they want it from people who are paid to go out and get news and get it right. I think we can make journalism work again, probably mostly on the Internet. Do some of us still hope to work for The New York Times someday? Sure. That’s the beacon. But the trends are clear. It’s likely going to have to be something else.”

Photo by Makistrunc

Allison Wickler

The word storytelling gets used a lot at the journalism school these days. So here’s a story: Every weekday during the school year, 20,000 free copies of the Minnesota Daily are distributed to campus news racks. By the end of the day, they are all gone. On Thursday afternoons, Lavrusik meets with his editors in a sunny room to map out upcoming stories for the week ahead. There is a lot to talk about. The pace is hectic and the stakes are sometimes high. The Daily covers campus issues closely—the paper’s examination of rising tuition costs has been relentless (ironically, funding for the Daily comes from mandatory student fees and grants from the U)—and grabs what it can from the larger world. The paper’s coverage of the I–35W Bridge collapse was regarded as among the best by any news source. This is hard work. “My schedule is very tight,” says Allison Wickler. “But I work best that way. It’s a constant rhythm. I don’t remember what it was like before I did this.” Wickler, a twenty-one-year-old senior from Pewaukee, Wisconsin, was the Daily’s managing editor until December. She helped Lavrusik oversee a staff of thirty-two reporters. Reporters work a twenty-five-hour week and earn at least $8.75 an hour. With incentive bonuses, Lavrusik will make $34,873 during his twelve-month appointment as editor in chief. These just might be the best journalism jobs these kids will ever have. Lavrusik tells me that when he recently had lunch with last year’s editor, who now works at a newspaper in outstate Wisconsin, she asked him to pay.

“In absolutely every class, we talk about how there won’t be any jobs for us,” says Wickler. “I honestly don’t know how I can believe that. I work with so many talented people that I can’t imagine there won’t be a place for them in journalism.”