Newspapers looking for death sentence reprieve
Easy Reader publisher Kevin Cody during an era when everything seemed possible, even expanded hours at the public library. Photo courtesy of the Pacific Palisadian Post.
At the crowded opening of Congressman Henry Waxman’s office at Raleigh Studios last month, I asked the Beach Cities’ new Representative his opinion on oil drilling in Hermosa Beach’s tidelands. The ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce Committee is not easily blindsided. Though his district was expanded just this year to include the Beach Cities, he has been the Westside’s Congressman for four decades.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
Readily flattered, but not wanting to monopolize his time, I ran down the chronology: residents voted to ban drilling in 1929 and again in 1958. In 1984 they voted to lift the ban and in 1995 to re-impose the ban. Another measure to lift the ban will appear on the March 2014 ballot.
To fill in the details, I suggested he visit EasyReaderNews.com. The online morgue contains over 150 articles and letters to the editor about Hermosa oil, dating back to 2002 when we launched the website. For older stories, I welcomed the Congressman and his aides to review our bound issues (1982 through 2012) and unbound issues from 1970, the year Easy Reader was founded.
We also have a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from the 1958 oil election.
Waxman’s question about Hermosa’s history wasn’t unusual. Last week, marketing consultant Rick Ciampa spent the afternoon in our office looking through our bound volumes for stories about the Storm of 1983. Ciampa is preparing a 30th anniversary exhibit of photographer Robi Hutas’ historic photos of waves crashing over the Hermosa pier and the Redondo Break wall, decades before global warming entered the vernacular.
Hermosa activist Jim Lisner was in two weeks ago searching for a legal notice announcing a ballot initiative to rezone property adjacent to Learned Lumber. The Hermosa planning department didn’t have it, nor was it on the city’s web site. Lisner found the legal notice in the May 19, 1999 Easy Reader. He wanted to study its wording for an initiative he is preparing to rezone the downtown.
A Seattle writer called recently looking for every story we have printed about South Bay surfing. He is writing about surfing’s influence on culture, worldwide. There is no more comprehensive archive of South Bay surfing, the ground zero of modern surfing, than Easy Reader’s morgue. The stories date back to the short board revolution in the 1970s and continue through this year’s Fifth Annual Bare Back contest. For those interested, pro surfer Cheyne Magnusson won the 2013 Bareback, wearing neoprene chaps and nothing more. Photos may be viewed in our on-line archives.
Not because we recognized them as future historical figures, but simply because they made news, our morgue includes stories about board builders Hap Jacob, Dewey Weber, Greg Noll, Pat Ryan and Phil Becker; wetsuit inventors Bob and Bill Meistrell; surf photographers Leroy Grannis and Mike Balzer; pro surfers Mike Purpus, Alex Gray, and Holly Beck; and surf shop owners Eddie Talbot of ET Surf, Becker Surf’s Dave Hollander and Steve Mangiagli, and Spyder Surf’s Dennis Jarvis and Dickie O’Reilly.
No doubt some of the South Bay High School Surf League and South Bay Boardriders competitors we currently write about will become similarly important figures in surfing. We don’t know which ones, but it doesn’t matter. All their stories and photographs are archived.
We wouldn’t charge Congressman Waxman or anyone else for access to our morgue, any more than universities or libraries would charge for access to their archives. From the time of Medieval court historians and monastic scribes to modern day newspapers, public repositories of knowledge have been funded by patrons.
In the case of newspaper morgues, the newspapers themselves have been the patrons.
When Otis Chandler decided to transform the Los Angeles Times into a newspaper that rivaled the New York Times and the Washington Post, it wasn’t so he could raise advertising rates. The Times made plenty of money during its decades of mediocre journalism. The shot putter and car racer did it out of competitive pride and civic duty.
“No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did,” journalist David Halberstam wrote in his history of the company.
During Chandler’s 20 years as publisher, from 1960 to 1980, the Times won seven Pulitzers, over twice the number it won in the preceding 20 years
The Times Pulitzer Prize winning Column 1 stories of the Chandler era sometimes took years to write and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, only to disappear after one day into the Times’ morgue. The Times continues to win Pulitzer’s almost every year. But today, more often than not, its Column 1 stories are little more than colorful “slices of life,” not because the Times is no longer committed to Pulitzer Prize-quality journalism, or its writers are any less talented, but because it can’t afford stories that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The great, ironic tragedy of the digital age is that it democratized news media while financially devouring it. Increased access has come at the cost of lessened quality in the nation’s newspaper morgues.
No where is the phrase disruptive technology more aptly applied than to newspapers, whose readers are migrating en mass to smart phones and tablets.
Newspapers have followed the readers, but the money hasn’t. Newspapers traditionally have charged advertisers $25 per thousand readers. The typical CPM for website advertising viewed on a desktop computer is $3.50.
And sinking.
“In the next 12 to 18 months, many news organizations will cross the 50 percent threshold where more users are visiting on phones and tablets than on desktop computers and laptops,” writes Fiona Spruill, editor of emerging platforms at The New York Times.
The CPM for mobile advertising is 75 cents. At that rate, if the 50,000 residents who receive Easy Reader each Thursday chose to read the paper at EasyReaderNews.com, our web ads would sell for $37.50/week. Our average print ad is $400 per week.
Digital’s coming triumph over print was evident in last month’s premier of Netflix’s first original content show “House of Cards.” In the pivotal scene a young WashingtonD.C. newspaper reporter breathlessly tells her editor she has a scoop. But she doesn’t scream “Stop the presses.” Instead, she asks her editor, “How quickly can we get this on line?” The next scene shows readers all over Washington, in coffee shops, on the Capital steps and at office water coolers, reading the hot story. Tellingly, they are not reading on smart phones and tablets. They are reading the front page of the print edition. Even in Hollywood, the money shot is still newsprint, at least this season.
Every day people tell me they prefer reading Easy Reader at EasyReaderNews.com over the print edition, delivered each Thursday to their doorsteps for the past four decades. Even I read Easy Reader on my smart phone. Easy Reader’s motto used to be “Read it, it’s easy.” Our new motto could be, “Read it. It’s even easier.”
In writing about another contemporary culture clash with readers, author Salmon Rushdie said, in his recently published autobiography, that he often despaired of the fatwa against him ever being lifted. An Iranian ayatollah decreed Rushdie should die for committing blasphemy against Muhammad in his novel Satanic Verses.
But Giandomenico Picco, a United Nations negotiator, reassured him that a solution would be found.
“The trouble with negotiating such a deal,” Picco said, “is that you spend a lot of time waiting for the train to arrive at the station, but you don’t know at which station it will arrive. The art of the negotiation is to be standing at as many stations as possible, so that when the train arrives, you are there.”
The Los Angeles Times is following a similar strategy in its efforts to negotiate a lifting of the death sentence issued by the internet.
In addition to selling ads on its website, the Times is charging readers for access to its website. The price is $3.99/week, unless you also subscribe to the Sunday print edition. Then it’s only $1.99 a week. The counter intuitive pricing is based on the theory that ad revenue from the Sunday print edition will subsidize the digital edition.
The Times is also experimenting with patron funding. Only the Times isn’t the patron. The patron is the Ford Foundation. It gave the Times $1 million last year “to expand its coverage of key beats, including immigration and ethnic communities in Southern California, the southwest U.S. border and the emerging economic powerhouse of Brazil,” according to the Times.
And finally, the Times is testing what might be called the newspaper nuclear option. It is distributing a free edition to non print subscribers. The difference between the free edition and the paid edition is the free edition has no news, only ads.
Hopefully, future readers researching their newspapers’ morgues will find not just ads, but stories of the negotiations that lifted the newspaper death sentence. If they do, I’m betting it’s because readers finally agreed to pay for the stories they read.
Kevin Cody is the publisher of Easy Reader. ER