The Commercial
Appeal has decided that it should
concentrate on local news. But that doesn’t go far enough. It should break the
chains of its corporate masters and become locally owned.
Excepting the Christmas decorations of Peanuts characters, Memphis gets very
little out of having its only daily newspaper owned by the E.W. Scripps Company
in Cincinnati. In the big picture, Scripps newspapers are as old-fashioned as
founder Edward W. Scripps’ custom of smoking 40 cigars a day. After closing the
Birmingham Post-Herald in September and selling its assets to its rival
for $40.8 million, Scripps has 20 daily papers. The company’s most profitable
and cutting-edge media operations are its six cable networks, 10 television
stations, and online shopping subsidiary Shopzilla.
Consolidation was the trend in the
newspaper business in the 20th century. Now competition from the Internet and
declining circulations are forcing editors, publishers, and investors to
scramble. The CA announced another round of employee buyouts this month.
The Knight-Ridder newspaper chain is up for sale, as a whole or in pieces.
Gannett is the newspaper industry giant, with 99 papers, including USA Today,
the Nashville Tennessean, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the
Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,
the survivor of a circulation war with Gannett that ended in 1991, is locally
owned by WEHCO Media.
Contrary to popular belief, the
newspaper business is quite profitable. Scripps’ newspaper division earned a
profit of $167 million through the first nine months of 2005. The stock price
has tripled since 1996. General Motors and Northwest Airlines are laying off
employees and making cuts to try to regain profitability. The CA is
buying out senior employees and cutting the size of the newspaper to maintain a
profit margin that is anyone’s guess. The last reliable figure, 36 percent, came
out inadvertently in a 1991 lawsuit.
Scripps spokesman Tim Stautberg said the company does not release financials for
individual papers or comment on potential acquisitions or sales. The CA
wouldn’t be cheap, assuming Scripps would sell it.
When
I bounced the idea off of Morgan Keegan chairman Allen Morgan Jr. and business
consultant John Malmo, both of them were skeptical that anyone would pay the
price. But I wonder. Memphis and Memphians overpay for lots of things, from
former Grizzlies hoopster Bryant “Big Country” Reeves to the Cannon Center for
the Performing Arts. A daily newspaper is endlessly challenging, entertaining,
influential, and new. Memphis prides itself on being an entrepreneurial,
major-league city. A bigger and better home-owned newspaper would distinguish it
as much as an NBA team.
Scripps doesn’t seem to have its heart in Memphis. Its annual report and Web
site tout the wonders of food, home decorating, HGTV, the Food Network, Internet
shopping, and shopping on television. It’s unfair to blame CA editor
Chris Peck and his shorthanded staff for the shrinking newspaper. The corporate
decisions are made in Cincinnati. It would be better if the blame, the credit,
the profits, and the decisions about the paper’s future stayed here.
The
Tennessean, Clarion-Ledger, and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
are in capital cities and aspire to be statewide newspapers. The CA is in
the difficult position of serving a sprinkling of readers outside Shelby County,
which has more poor people and non-readers than any county in Tennessee.
So
local ownership is a long shot. It’s expensive. It’s a tough business. But where
is it written that newspapers must have a 20 to 30 percent margin? The
Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal (Tupelo) is owned by a nonprofit. The
Wall Street Journal puts out a daily primer in great newspapering,
independent of the editorial page. Temper that with Elmore Leonard’s advice to
aspiring writers — “leave out the parts readers skip” — and you have a good
start. In 1948, journalist H.L. Mencken was asked about the new media: “The way
for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television,” he said,
“is simply to get out better newspapers.”
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