Death of the Regional Newspaper Bureau in Washington

I don't have answers, but I have a question.
Absent local newspapers, how do you create a demand for investigative reporting? I mean the kind of demand that gets someone to actually pay for it. After all, monitoring our leaders is the purpose of a free press, right?
How 'bout some reality-TV hybrid between C-SPAN and the National Enquirer -- "all scandals, all the time"?
But I don't want to create a demand for the scandals themselves.

Here is what I believe. Newspapers hastened their own demise by putting their product online for free. Why in the world would I pay a dime for a newspaper if i can get the same information online whenever I want to? I mean it never made much sense to me as to why they did it but I think we are seeing the price they are paying now. And unfortunately there are not a lot of ways to unring that bell. The only thing i can think of is if every traditional newspaper banded together to either take the papers offline OR charge for online subscriptions. Mind you I would be leading the protests against such actions whilst calling the newspaper people all forms of vile creatures, but its the only way I can see them saving themselves

"Nobody else would've gotten Duke Cunningham. USA Today, AP, New York Times, none of them would devote resources to a backbench, local San Diego congressman in that kind of detail"
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Actually, TPM did. Kudos to Josh Marshall.
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But no question that America will be worse off with the loss of reporters.

KT-
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We touched on this when we were talking with Jay Rosen.
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It really looks as if this niche will have to be filled with citizen journalists blogging, if it is to be filled at all. That's not an impossible hope. If you look, for example, at local CT blogs, you'll see that there is good work being done. Or, at Phillip Anderson's Albany Project.
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But, as you said, how does this make anybody any money? Which was your shorthand for "What sustainable business model is there for local news coverage?" Still an open question.
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It's interesting that the article refers to Cunningham, because I don't read the local San Diego newspaper. Josh Marshall, or one of the minions in his vast media empire does read that paper. That's where I got my Duke Cunningham reporting.
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Also, while we deliciously remember Jay Carney getting schooled by Josh, all he really did was notice that there was a rash of stories in different local papers--Albuquerque, St. Paul--that US Attorneys were being removed from office at an unprecedented rate. Without that original reporting, the Rove may well have been able to position vote suppression operations in a dozen purple states through the DOJ.
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Without those stories, and his herding up his readers to look for others, there would have been no national story.

Watching the Minneapolis paper go down the tubes has been depressing. As a kid I carried, at different times, the M-Sat morning Tribune, the M-Sat Evening Star and the Sunday Tribune.
They have cut back so harshly that the quality is painful. More and more NYT and WAPO stories fewer and fewer staff written.
It's not just investigative stories it is having local knowledge to inform a story.

Think about this, if a newspaper charged just a dollar a month per subscriber then they would only need less than 500,000 subscribers month to month to pull in 5 mill a year which is a helluva lot better than giving it away for free I would think

I suppose one option is for a group of local newspapers to support DC reporting staffs. The downside is that the emphasis would be statewide rather than local city or county based reporting. The reporter(s) would have to cover the entire state delegation in the House and Senate.

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"Nobody else would've gotten Duke Cunningham
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Sorry, this is wrong. It was a reporter on the San Diego Union-Tribune (a Copley paper) IN SAN DIEGO who "got" Duke Cunningham. It was NOT the Washington bureau of Copley who discovered Cunningham's crimes. Copley in Washington apparently missed the crimes massively corrupt Congressman had been doing FOR YEARS, right under the nose of DC journalism, including the Copley bureau in Washington. In addition, it was Josh Marshall at TPM who doggedly followed that story, including the firing of Carol Lam (the US Attorney) and the news bits leading to Dusty Foggo's indictments and others.
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I can't recall that ANY mainstream journalist in DC EVER contrited a scoop to this story, despite the fact that the Dukester and others have been doing this under their nose for years. Perhaps someone can remind me otherwise.

cross post. sqrl.
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But I think I'm right on this. Josh didn't do the initial original reporting, in my recollection. This is a huge issue. Traditional media folks believe the web is parasitic, destructively so, sucking the lifeblood from the host. I don't think that's entirely so--look at the Libby trial for an example of original reporting on the web. And look to the local blogs I referred to above.
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But there is a lot of truth to this. All atrios does is watch the teevee, read the web and post links. If there weren't people doing the actual reporting his blog really would be sucky. It is not clear there is a sustainable business model for some kinds of reporting. KT refers to local papers covering their congresscritter. But there's also the question of foreign bureaus. It's hard, if you're a bean counter wanting to make the quarterly numbers, to justify having a bureau in Riyadh.

Steve Bennen has an excellent piece up about the left wing blogs vs the right wing blogs and why right wing blogs are largely irrelevant.

Aha.
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Thanks James.

sgwhiteinfla:
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I disagree. Information wants to be free. Newspapers had two options:
(1) charge for access to content (and go broke, because nobody will pay you); or
(2) make money off online advertising revenue (which makes sense since ad revenue is what makes money for dead-tree editions, anyway).
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If I had to point to something that journalists could do that would actually save their profession it would be to enforce their own ethical codes. What is killing the industry is the ability of media companies to package crap together and call it "news". Where is the incentive to pay for quality, investigative journalism when you can simply drag a couple of people into a studio and have them argue for a few minutes on any topic of the day? Cable news is killing newspapers because TV is considered an acceptable medium for delivering information. But if journalists united and refused to treat cable news as anything other than the lousy infotainment that it is, if the actually refused to go on these shows (looking at you, Joe Klein), maybe things would be different.

James LA
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Actually I think that was the point the author (not KT) was trying to make

Molly Ivins would weep at this news.
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It's going on at the local level as well - less reporters means no one is doing the local government beat the way it should be done.
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It really looks as if this niche will have to be filled with citizen journalists blogging, if it is to be filled at all. That's not an impossible hope.
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It's no replacement for a vigorous professional press. Most bloggers have to hold down a day job.

Think about this, if a newspaper charged just a dollar a month per subscriber then they would only need less than 500,000 subscribers month to month to pull in 5 mill a year which is a helluva lot better than giving it away for free I would think
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This has been tried. Failed. NYT, Slate among others. WSJ still works this way. But I cannot think of any other.
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Advertising for an audience an order of magnitude or so more generates more revenue than a subscription fee. Not nearly the revenue of auto dealer ads and classifieds. But more revenue.

sqrl
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Don't mean to be picking on you, but the teevee is not what we're talking about here. It's funny that the tradmed folks like to diss on the blogosphere for being parasitic, because so is the teevee and radio. The original reporting is still done by the newspapers. My local radio newsstation essentially reads the front page of the NYT aloud every morning.

sgr1
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Its easy to say that nobody will pay NOW because nobody has to. But if every single newspaper including the nationals were charging for access not all of us but many of us would gladly fork over a dollar a month for access to the newspaper. And again they wouldn't HAVE to get everyone to pay, but if one person paid it would be more than what they are getting right now. Online advertising is cool but most of the time there isnt a lot of money to be made off of those ads. Right now here in Tampa we have two newspapers, the Tampa Tribune and the St Pete Times, one of them is 25 cents a day the other is 50 cents a day so a dollar a month is still a steal. Now optimally this should have happened initially before anybody ever had a taste of free access to newspapers but if they change course now there will be some grumbling but quite a few people will still pay 12 bucks a year for access. Don't forget that 99 percent of bloggers base their blogging off of articles from a MSM source. Even if it was just bloggers having to pay for access again that would be money that the dead tree crowd aren't getting right now

And I look at the person of the year banner and say "Tina Fey? WTF is up with that?"

This has been tried. Failed. NYT, Slate among others. WSJ still works this way. But I cannot think of any other.

There are no others. And while online revenue is growing, it's not growing fast enough to replace print advertising losses.
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The problem is especially acute for local papers.

Back in the olden days you didn't have these regional chains who buy up a bunch of local papers and then suck the lifeblood out of them. Take McClatchy - fine, fine journalism, but massively mismanaged. Their CEO laid off 150 journos while taking an 800,000 bonus as he saw the value of his company decline by 35% in 2007. The journos suffer, but top managment is largely to blame. I think there will be a period where these regional chains will die off, hometown newspapers will spring up again and we will have vigorous competition for readers, whether on line, or print.
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Meanwhile, the credibility of the nationals continue to erode and that trend is accelerating. People just don't believe them any more, and without credibility, their product isn't worth much. A period of shakeout of the truly mediocre is probably in order. No one should be sorry to see them go.

sgw--
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Yeah, but, you would have to form a newspaper cartel to do this. Because if everybody else charged for access, and the St Petersberg paper didn't, the St Pete site would get all the traffic and lots of advertising revenue. If you can't link (and, believe me, when the NYT went behind the wall, they lost a lot of readers. the op-ed people all hated the wall.), then you can't send traffic there.
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The internet really does want information to be free.

4legs, thanks for mentioning Molly Ivins -- I'd been thinking lately how she would have enjoyed seeing this election.

Thanks for highlighting this, KT. I don't see how we get out of this. Money's going to be tight everywhere for a while.
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Please tell me that Michael was sent to time out as a consequence of turning in this bit of PR for a failed smear merchant.