Pay more, get less

Shortly after raising subscription rates recently, the Richmond Times-Dispatch (RTD) acknowledged your daily newspaper is going to be 16-20 pages less each week. The downsizing of the news staff and other departments began more than a year ago, so the page reduction is probably greater than that.

Newspapers are used to printing bad news but prefer to have it about others. Though the RTD has printed some stories about its downsizing (often in the context of what's happening to daily papers nationwide), the human side goes unreported. Numerous former RTD employees were pushed out the door after years of service to search for new jobs (not careers) or enter retirement prematurely. In their wake, some of those jobs disappeared or were filled by less experienced reporters or reporters who covered other beats for years. Media General, which publishes the RTD, says it will cut its workforce by nearly 11 percent by the end of this month to save $40 million annually. Many of those job cuts and retirement offers are at its daily newspaper in Tampa, Fla.

Fortunately for us and others, weekly newspapers nationwide continue to see growth as readers more than ever want to know what is going on in their communities.

It's not that dailies nationwide are not profitable, it's that they're not as profitable - to the tune of 25 percent - as they used to be. Like other businesses, the dailies have put their bottom lines and stockholders ahead of their readers and employees. Those who own Media General stock, which is off by about 60 percent from a year ago, are wishing for the good old days, but in our opinion, that's not going to happen. The Internet is the great equalizer when it comes to news, making it available for free when the reader wants it.

For decades broadcasters have battled the dailies for advertising budgets, saying newspapers survive because most cities only have limited competition with one newspaper. The number of dailies, now down to about 1,600, is sure to decline - as sure as their circulations wither.

The real concern is that adults under 40 years of age, who don't have the "hold the newspaper in your hands habit," may be lost forever - similar to what happened in the 1970s when that age group abandoned AM radio for FM and never returned. And as we have said before, few newspapers make money off their Web sites. If they are profitable, it's because of the news content provided from their print newspaper.

Television news, as a government-enforced monopoly, is facing a similar fate as those with above average incomes spend more time with cable/satellite news and weather channels and the Internet on their own schedules. Local television news is eroding its own audience as stations provide more news from elsewhere read by a local reporter, who doesn't know much more than he/she was provided by the network.

Local radio is ahead of the dwindling news trend in Richmond, getting there faster because the Federal Communications Commission allows one company to own as many as six stations in a market the size of Richmond. Again, profits going to corporations elsewhere come before reporting the news and public service.

Ironically, radio and television stations will suffer (and so will their audiences) as the RTD reports less. The RTD is the clear market leader for news in the metro, and radio and television stations have been ripping the daily off for years, rewriting its stories to represent them as their own. All too often you can see a video version of an RTD story on the 6 o'clock news.

Television news operations keep files of newspaper stories (including from this paper) so their reporters will understand the issues. If there were standards of journalism (SOJ) as there are SOLs (standards of learning in our schools), there would be a lot fewer broadcast reporters here. But of course broadcasters would protest SOJs as a denial of their First Amendment privileges.