Hedged by Margot Susca

Author:Margot Susca [Susca, Margot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252055089
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Chapter 7

Neglected Audiences

For Jenny Breen, subscribing to a newspaper was just something adults did.1 You paid rent. You did your own laundry. And you subscribed to the newspaper. Breen, forty, grew up in a household with a print subscription to the Florida Times-Union, a Jacksonville daily owned by Morris Communications for decades. GateHouse bought it in 2017, and it's now a piece of the Gannett chain. Newspapers throughout American history have provided subscribers a window onto their communities, a kind of connection to both local politics and civic life, with space for features and entertainment. Breen respected that connection, and she sought it out. As a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill undergraduate, she and her housemates paid for a News & Observer subscription. By 2005 she and her husband had moved to Ithaca, New York, and the couple took a subscription to the Ithaca Journal, a newspaper with such a long history in the region that its early nineteenth-century leaders reminded subscribers to pay with cash, not vegetables.2 Less than one hundred years after its founding, the newspaper caught the attention of Cornell University graduate Frank Gannett. He bought the Ithaca Journal in 1912, and it became the second newspaper in what eventually would become a national media empire.

When Breen signed up for her subscription, Gannett had a combined nationwide paid circulation of 7.3 million.3 “At the end of 2005, the company operated 91 U.S. daily newspapers, including USA Today, and nearly 1,000 non-daily local publications in 36 states and Guam,” its annual report showed. Gannett employed 39,700 full- and part-time staff, and that year local advertising revenue from its local newspapers jumped 8 percent, to $163 million. Its publishing revenues were up 6.2 percent over 2004, bringing its total revenue companywide to $6.9 billion. Yet despite those robust revenues and three years before the Great Recession, executives revealed concerns on the horizon about rising costs, most notably, “employee benefit costs.”4 Gannett, like other publicly traded newspaper companies, has long looked for ways to maximize profits, and cutting staff even in years of hefty profitability has been one of those ways. In 2006 Gannett laid people off at the Livonia Observer & Eccentric a year after acquiring the Michigan daily.5 The next few years would be a bloodbath for Gannett staff and reporters at daily newspapers nationwide. “In SEC documents covering those years, they cited a long list of accomplishments that specifically included whacking 11,000 jobs,” former Gannett editor and reporter Jim Hopkins wrote in a 2013 blog post.6 As layoffs accelerated, local news stopped getting produced, and wire service and national content took its place.

On visits home to Jacksonville, Breen remembered asking her parents why they still subscribed, noting that the Florida Times-Union was filled with advertisements and wire content, and she believed it offered little connection to the community she remembered. “‘This is garbage,’ I said to them. I asked them, ‘How can you pay for that?’” Breen remembered. She started to feel that way about the Ithaca paper, too.

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