It's a Wrap

In the Internet age, people aren't stuck with the same 10 choices; thanks to Amazon.com, they can order books that are out of print, movies that failed to get distribution deals, and albums that never reach critical mass. And as we head out in a million different directions for content, the market share for bestsellers, and daily newspapers, is dropping precariously.

Consider the Republic. The state's population has grown a staggering 20 percent in the past six years. In that period, the Republic's circulation has actually dropped nearly 11 percent.

What's really crazy: That's not bad by industry standards. If anything, the Republic is doing better than most major dailies. Last year, the L.A. Times lost 8 percent of its circulation in just six months.

In 1953, 1.23 newspapers were sold per household across the country each day, according to the Census Bureau. Today, that number hovers around just 0.5.

The Philadelphia Inquirer laid off 17 percent of its newsroom this winter. The San Francisco Chronicle is about to cut 25 percent, and that's after years of economic reductions.

"Newspapers are now where the film industry was in the 1990s," observes Greg Patterson, a former member of the Arizona Legislature. (His blog, www.espressopundit, has been highly critical of the Republic — and has scooped it more than once. ) "People still take pictures; they just don't use film. Purists will argue that film is a better product. Mainstream journalists will argue that newspapers are more accurate than blogs.

"Tell that to the guy who invented the Betamax."

In 2000, the Pulliams sold their newspapers in Arizona and Indianapolis for $2.6 billion. Since then, everything good and everything bad about the Republic has been Gannett.

Based in McLean, Virginia, Gannett is a media juggernaut: 89 daily newspapers, more than 1,000 nondailies, and 23 TV stations. The company's papers, which include USA Today and the Detroit Free Press, have a paid circulation of 7.2 million.

Gannett still can't seem to get any respect.

Perhaps that's because the company's big metropolitan papers, the Free Press and the Republic, are still fairly recent acquisitions. For decades, Gannett mostly ran its presses in small towns you wouldn't want to visit: Chillicothe, Ohio; Wausau, Wisconsin; Utica, New York.

Even today, the Republic is the chain's second-biggest newspaper, topped only by USA Today.

As much as geography, though, it's the newspapers themselves that get journalism snobs sneering. To some, USA Today, which Gannett launched in 1982, exemplifies everything that's wrong with modern journalism in America. It's all about short stories and even shorter tidbits, colorful graphics, sports statistics, and celebrities. It's "news you can use" — not "all the news that's fit to print."

Really, it wasn't the Internet that first perfected the art of short, pithy journalism. It was Gannett.

A great example? There were two big stories on the day USA Today launched: Lebanon's prime minister was assassinated, and Princess Grace of Monaco died in a car crash. Most big newspapers, naturally, led with the assassination. That was the important news — the significant story.

But as Peter S. Prichard recounts in his book The Making of McPaper: The Inside Story of USA Today, Gannett's CEO, Al Neuharth, stopped in a bar around 6 p.m. to take the country's temperature.

"The Lebanon thing didn't get a spark out of anyone," Neuharth reported, according to Prichard. "So I went back to the newsroom and told everyone, 'No question, the lead story has to be Princess Grace.'" The Lebanon assassination ran as — no joke — a brief on A-1.

That's Gannett.

Some journalists sneered at that decision: Who cares if the barflies are talking about Princess Grace? They should care about the Lebanese president.

There's a reason, however, that Gannett has been a solid hitter on Wall Street even as more "respectable" media companies are in a death spiral. Maybe USA Today dumbed down the country. More likely, it published the stories that a big chunk of the nation wanted to read. Who's even heard of Bashir Gemayel today? (And there's no question that, if the two deaths occurred today, Web sites everywhere would lead with Princess Grace — and register thousands more hits.)

Clearly, Gannett pays attention. No matter what the problem du jour in the newspaper business, you can bet Gannett is studying it, setting up focus groups to talk about it, and writing up plans to help its newspapers deal with it. And any time one newspaper comes up with something that works, that becomes codified as a "best practice" for the other newspapers to follow.