Newsday was the hometown paper for those of us living on Long Island. No, it was no New York Times, but a Daily News, maybe. Better than a New York Post, except for page 6. I’ve linked to it for stories. Written op-eds for it. Read the hard copy with morning coffee and on the train ride into Manhattan.
Those were the good old days, when Newsday was a real newspaper. Those days are gone.
When Newsday was purchased by the Dolans, of Cablevision infamy, we knew the end was near. The ax swung broadly around the newsroom and through the hearts of the editorial staff. Most of the stories are now AP or purchased from elsewhere. The op-eds are largely gone. Some local news remains, written by actual reporters, but are spread too thin and cover too little. The idea of investigating a story is farcical; the few remaining are lucky to make deadline on the daily fluff. It’s not the fault of the remaining staff, as much as the simple fact of life for a few people doing the job of many.
This was all anticipated. The Dolans weren’t newspaper people. Chuck Dolan was once a cable television visionary. His son Jim, who hold the reins of Newsday, only knows how the turn the crank on a cash machine. As their vision of Newsday came into focus, it became clear that there was no desire to own a newspaper, but rather to create a value added benefit to Cablevision subscribers, a wedge to fight the telephone company’s intrusion into their domain and an excuse to raise cable prices. As if they ever needed an excuse before.
Newsday has now become a captive of Cablevision. It’s closed its doors to non-cable subscribers, unless you want to pay a fee. No one will pay the fee, as it would be plain nuts. This change was serious enough to cause long-time business columnist, Saul Friedman, one of the few who still had the password to a computer terminal, to hang up his keyboard.
Mr. Friedman, who had written a column for Newsday since 1996, quit last week over the paper’s decision to require some readers to pay for access to its Web site.And that includes readers here, who don’t carry a subscription to Newsday. This creates quite a quandary, since any link to a Newsday story will leave others unable to read it, to see the source material upon which I’ve relied. But then, there’s no alternative news source for Long Island. But then, is Newsday even a news source anymore, or the house organ for Cablevision?
That did not sit well with Mr. Friedman, a freelancer who wrote Gray Matters, a weekly column on aging. He explained his departure in a note to Jim Romenesko’s media blog. In an interview, Mr. Friedman said, “My column has been popular around the country, but now it was really going to be impossible for people outside Long Island to read it.” That includes him; living outside Washington, he is not a subscriber to Newsday or Cablevision.
I’ll miss Newsday. The old Newsday, that was a leading paper with hard-hitting investigative journalism and top-notch columnists. The less old Newsday that adequately covered Long Island local news, unafraid to out abuse and misconduct. The new Newsday is a monument to the death of journalism and the elevation of collateral business acumen over a vital free press. Business has won.
From Great Neck to Montauk, there will no longer be any news. Will the last one out please shut off the lights. Electricity costs money, you know.
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Mr. Friedman is taking a principled stand and resigning because he wants Newsday to distribute his column — for which Newsday presumably pays him — to readers who do not pay for the content. And you are complaining — not wholly unjustifiably — that Newsday’s staff is a shell of its former self, with a newsroom hacked and slashed to the point that its local content is anemic and flimsy.
If Newsday distributes its content for free, how is it supposed to generate enough revenue to pay for a newsroom that is once again able to devote adequate resources to appropriately cover its local market?
For the past ten years or so, newspapers have been bleeding daily readers of the print edition, the circulation of which the newspapers use to set ad rates. Production and distribution is break-even at best, so these ad revenues are what allows the newspaper to do things like staff a newsroom (and, like any other business, line the pockets of its owners). The fewer print readers there are, the lower the ad revenues, and the slimmer the staffs. Internet readership is not going to make up this difference.
The thinking of the early-’00s — that giving away content for free on the Internet was the wave of the future, because banner ad clickthroughs would be a windfall source of revenue — has proven to be wrong. Newspapers are doing whatever they can to stop the bleeding. One of the best ways to do that is to stop giving your product away for free, especially when you have a lock on local news, which Newsday (and many other dailies) has.
Who knows if this strategy will work. Suits in the newspaper industry aren’t the most adept at spotting and capitalizing on trends. But at least they are ostensibly attempting to generate more revenue, which, in turn, may result in a better editorial product.
Criticizing the conglomeration of media, as occurred with Cablevision’s purchase of Newsday, is legitimate, as is the criticism of the subsequent gutting of the newsroom (it’s hard to sell a product when there is no one to produce the product). But criticism of a company’s strategy for no longer giving away its product for free is misplaced.
If we take each circumstance independently, as it exists today, your point is well taken. But that’s not quite the way things happened. Newsday got killed a few years back for fudging subscription numbers upon which advertising was based. This came as the paper’s content slid in cost-saving measures, after ill-conceived tweaks made it less desirable and lack of leadership (one publisher having had some particularly ugly legal problems). It’s reputation on the business side was badly hurt, leading to it being bought and sold as damaged goods. This isn’t the Dolans’ fault, of course. They just capitalized on it.
But the question was whether to take a once reputable, maybe even venerable, newspaper, maintain and expand its journalistic value and reputation to expand its readership, re-establish it’s intrinsic value and gain subscriber and advertising dollars. The use of the online version is clear from a journalistic perspective: Make it a destination based upon quality rather than a conduit for click-through advertising. Create a newspaper that people want to read and advertisers want to advertise in.
Or sell it off as excess to Cablevision for use as a house organ. The Dolans chose the latter.
Mr. Greenfield,
I appreciate and echo your sentiment about the state of the news on Long Island as it relates to Newsday. This once venerable institution is a shadow of its former self partly due to the overall decline in the economy, partly due to the difficulty daily papers everywhere are experiencing and partly due to the Dolans.
The decisions made by the Dolans are for good reason, however, if you consider their business model. They made a strategic purchase of Newsday for the express purpose of placing the web content behind the paid firewall and raising the single copy price to coerce Cablevision subscribers to stay with the Optimum service. Their entire business model revolves around protecting the Optimum service from the encroachment of Verizon. When you consider how profitable their cable delivery system core business is any losses taken at Newsday can be chalked up to subscriber acquisition cost.
In anticipation of the Cablevision takeover our company invested heavily into our online infrastructure last year and have hired several new members to our content team. We became full members of the Associated Press and created an investigative unit within the paper. Since June our daily web traffic for Long Island news and information has increased more than 450%, with a significant increase shortly after Newsday.com’s redesign.
As a weekly paper we have won more than 150 awards including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism on two occasions.
I would invite you to log onto longislandpress.com and join in our effort to take Newsday’s place as the newspaper of record on Long Island. We are committed to giving Long Island the news they deserve on a daily basis as we have been doing as a weekly for seven years.
Thank you for your blog. Glad to have stumbled upon it. Keep up the great work yourself.
Jed Morey
Publisher
Long Island Press
That’s an ambitious goal in a troubled economy and industry, but Long Island needs a paper of record, and I hope you are able to fill the void. Thanks for “stumbling” by.