It's a Wrap

The Pulliams could afford to be cavalier about expenses. In their heyday, daily newspapers everywhere were flush. And when it came to print advertising, they were practically the only game in town. Big businesses, from car dealers to department stores, were more than willing to pay steep prices for the privilege of advertising on their pages.

When the paper didn't like politicians, they knew it. Evan Mecham, the nutty car dealer turned governor, wrote in his autobiography about Publisher Eugene Pulliam "relishing his 'star is born' capabilities."

"Pulliam's money and power had accustomed him to making public policy by shaping and paternalistically 'speaking his mind' through the printed word directly to politicians," Mecham wrote. "Politicians could either broadly grin and mend their ways while bearing the pressure, or be forever disowned and punished by Pulliam."

It's no wonder the Republic was the paper that people loved to hate.

It had reach: statewide distribution, with bureaus in Prescott and Flagstaff and Tucson and Yuma and Nogales and even Globe. It also had two reporters in Washington, D.C., to cover national politics. The paper sent a reporter to Afghanistan long before the United States dreamed of getting involved there militarily. And when Governor Mecham began to self-immolate, and was eventually impeached, the paper put as many as five reporters on the beat.

"If it was a good story," Murphy says, "we were on it. Whenever it came to spending money, we spent it if we thought it was good for the newspaper."

For the 21st-century Republic, however, everything has changed.

It's not just that the newspaper is now determinedly, often boringly, objective — and much more likely to support the status quo than press an agenda. It's also that most of the bureaus have been shuttered. And the Republic didn't send a reporter to Iraq, even as much smaller papers, from the South Bend Tribune to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, did. A smattering of layoffs earlier this year did nothing to help morale.

The newsroom staff isn't significantly smaller, but it hasn't grown with Maricopa County. The Republic's top award-winner these days is Chris Hawley, who covers Mexico. Hawley was the Arizona Press Club's 2006 Journalist of the Year — a tribute to his talent, to be sure, but also an honor that suggests that no local reporters are getting the space or time to compile such a body of work.

Many of the Valley's most prominent public bodies, including the county Board of Supervisors, rarely get a reporter at their meetings.

Phoenix's once swaggering, agenda-setting hometown paper feels downright neutered.

It would be easy to blame Gannett, the company that acquired the Republic from the Pulliam family in 2000. Publicly traded companies like Gannett have shareholders to satisfy and quarterly numbers to watch. It takes a tight bottom line to keep profits going up.

But blaming Gannett would be ignoring a much bigger trend. Every major metropolitan daily in America is suffering.

Tim McGuire, a professor at Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism who studies the business of newspapers, says that the big local advertisers, like car dealers and department stores, pulled back in the '90s. Few people noticed, however, because the booming economy had sent demand for help-wanted ads soaring. Those ads became newspapers' new bread and butter.

Then came the rise of free Internet classifieds, and help-wanted ads migrated en masse to sites like Craigslist.org and Monster.com.

"That's when they knew they were in trouble," McGuire says. After all, department store ads had dramatically eroded. Car dealers weren't buying so many ads, either. The new superstores, Wal-Mart and Target, preferred to run inserts in the Sunday paper instead of full-page ads. Those inserts, McGuire says, are significantly less profitable for newspapers.

The revenue loss was just one part of a devastating double whammy. It wasn't just advertisers who were enjoying other opportunities.

It was readers, too.

Cheaper printing technologies made it easier to start a newspaper or a magazine. Although few are moneymakers, you can find dozens of glossies and community papers throughout this city alone: Think 944, or Phoenix Metropolitan, or even Java.

And, of course, there's the Internet.

It used to be that if you wanted to know what was going on, you had two basic reading choices: an afternoon paper, or a morning one. Today, you can visit any number of news Web sites: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, even the Times of London. And you don't even have to go to a newspaper Web site. Plenty of sites, like the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, or Yahoo! gather the top stories for you. Almost all those stories are 100 percent free to the reader.