The Sacramento Bee's crisis of relevance

2009-03-10T01:49:00Z

The Sunday, March 1, edition of the Sacramento Bee, included an article written by publisher Cheryl Dell entitled "It's not a lack of readers, it's a lack of advertising." The gist of the article was that despite the Bee's growing readership, advertising revenue has fallen, forcing the paper to reevaluate its business model. While it's never a bad idea to revisit policies when times get tough, I don't think Dell's column went far enough to acknowledge one of the biggest albatrosses hanging around the Bee's neck : the McClatchy Company.

I'm not trying to demonize McClatchy. The problem is that as a profit-seeking business, McClatchy has institutionally different goals and definitions of success than do its subordinate parts, including the Bee. McClatchy is a profit-seeking corporate entity, but the Bee is a member of our cherished free press, an institution enshrined in the Constitution and fundamental to our civil society. And though the Bee should be a civil servant in the best sense of the term, its expensive investigative reporting is going to create natural conflicts with McClatchy's profit motivation, beyond corporate editorial pressures.

For starters, consider that many papers nationwide, McClatchy-owned or not, are profitable in and of themselves but were required to make drastic cuts because their corporate owners incurred too much debt too quickly to maintain their business expansions. While the Bee may not itself be profitable, it is hard to believe that the paper has been so hammered by the recession that it had no choice but to eliminate half its staff and cut valuable inches from the printed edition. Not when its parent company, McClatchy, has watched its stock price drop from $74.50 in 2005 to $0.41 today. Sacramento's primary news source is suffering because McClatchy can no longer make the payments on its purhase of Knight-Ridder.

Consider also that though it is a sound business decision to save money by adopting corporation-wide platforms and standards, it undermines the ability of a newspaper to acknowledge and embrace its city’s character. Instead of a newspaper tailored to the unique interests and values of Sacramento, we readers are treated to mostly the same diluted content as other McClatchy readers. This is especially evident with McClatchy's web properties. Given an amazing and infinitely malleable digital distribution medium, Sacbee.com is a bland pixel-for-pixel rehash of McClatchy’s Charlotte Observer. Blank out locations and names, and you could not tell California from North Carolina.

Another sound business decision is to drop expensive original reporting in favor of cheaper, already-ubiquitous feeds. These days, there are more ways to receive an AP news feed than there are AP stories, and the same is true of nationally syndicated columns. Unfortunately, the Bee does neither itself nor its readership any favors by reprinting what is already widely available and eliminating what it alone can provide: local news, local opinions, a broad and diverse forum for community discourse, and public scrutiny of local powers.

A strong Bee would measure itself in its relevance to Sacramento, not its contribution to McClatchy’s share price. This means cutting back on wire and syndication reprints in favor of a renewed focus on local stories and local issues. This means celebrating life in Sacramento. This means redesigning the paper to reflect Sacramento’s unique character. This means prioritizing investigative pieces. Where advertising is concerned, this means pushing advertising quality over quantity and providing more column inches than ads.

As we've seen, good journalism can be severely undermined by the pressures of profits. If a for-profit business model is failing the Bee (and by extension, Sacramento), perhaps the paper should be excised from its corporate parent and given new life under a business model that would let it get back to journalism. That's something Cheryl Dell ought to consider.

Politics and Reporting

The Sacramento Bee's crisis of relevance