“The Strange Survival of Ink” was the headline to a recent Economist article marveling that somehow, some way, “almost all newspapers have survived.” This despite the recession, despite falling circulation, despite advertising revenues that according to the Newspaper Association of America have dropped 35 percent since early 2008. “For the most part,” said the Economist, “newspapers have cut their way out of crisis,” laying off staff, closing bureaus, combining operations. Then there’s newsprint, a huge expense that newspapers have slashed by as much as 40 percent by “using less of the stuff, printing fewer words on smaller, thinner pages.”
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Just last week the Tribune announced two new clients. It will now print this paper, the Chicago Reader. And it will print, distribute, and handle local ad sales for the Onion. “Printing the Reader is very exciting for us because it’s another larger publication that fits nicely within our capacity and our capabilities and it’s another commercial client in the mix,” said Becky Brubaker, the Tribune‘s senior vice president of manufacturing and distribution.
But from the Trib‘s point of view, the contract’s one more step down the yellow brick road to local hegemony. I asked the Trib what other titles the Freedom Center prints and got this list: Barron’s, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Investor’s Business Daily. And the Tribune itself, of course, and RedEye. Aside from the Reader, every newspaper the Tribune prints it also delivers, at least in part. And it delivers far more. That long list of beholden papers begins with the rival Sun–Times and the various properties of Sun-Times Media, including Pioneer Press, the Daily SouthtownStar, and the Post-Tribune.
There’s another danger—of businesses making the same mistake some people do, meeting other papers’ needs as they neglect their own.
When Padgett blogged three days later, it was to report that the Times had just suspended him. But two days after that, he announced he had his job back.
