Jon K. Lauck: Who Stopped the Presses?
The author of “The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest,” on what we lost when we lost our once great newspapers.
By Jon K. Lauck
I recently spoke to a friend in Illinois who noted that she couldn’t find anyone to talk to at the newspaper in Springfield, the state capital. All the reporters and editors were gone that day and the paper was just running Associated Press wire stories in its pages. The lights were on, but nobody was home.
In the year 2000, by contrast, there were 70 people in the newsroom of the Springfield State Journal-Register, including several librarians and news clerks and an editorial cartoonist and an art director. The paper even had a multi-person news bureau at the capitol to specifically cover politics and policy. A call to the newsroom then would be answered by a busy editor.
Today, crickets.
Who’s to blame for the decimation of hundreds of once bustling newsrooms and valuable newspapers? The internet? Social media? Corporate takeovers? Shareholder value? The answer is “yes.” To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “[T]hat thing is gone, that thing is gone. . . . That thing will come back no more.”
There are now fewer than 10 reporters and editors in The State Journal-Register newsroom, and that includes two sports reporters and a photographer. Who’s to blame for the decimation of the The State Journal-Register and hundreds of other once bustling newsrooms and valuable newspapers? The internet? Social media? Corporate takeovers? Shareholder value? The answer is “yes.” To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “[T]hat thing is gone, that thing is gone. . . . That thing will come back no more.”
But did the presses have to stop so abruptly? Was there a better way forward? In 2007, with subscriptions rapidly dwindling, The State Journal-Register was purchased by GateHouse Media, which promised “hyperlocal” coverage of city and regional events—something we hear a lot of these days.
But that’s not what happened. The newspaper has instead been “decimated by staff cuts,” according to the Illinois Times, and the printing press was sold for scrap. GateHouse also sold the once-impressive downtown offices of The State Journal-Register, which, in a bit of ominous symbolism, are being transformed into the county morgue.
The disintegration of the newspaper in Springfield, Ill., is not an uncommon story in the Midwest. In Indianapolis in 2000, The Indianapolis Star had over 300 people in its newsroom. Now it has fewer than 50, a diminishment of 85% of the newspaper’s one-time reporting strength. The circulation of The Star was 411,000 on Sunday in 1990; now it is 66,000. In the 1970s, the circulation of the Sunday Des Moines Register was 535,000 and the weekday edition was 250,000. In 2020, these numbers had dropped to an anemic 53,000 and 35,000.
It’s the same story throughout the Midwest. In the early 1980s, the circulation of The Cleveland Plain Dealer was 501,000 on Sundays and 497,000 on weekdays. It now has 171,404 readers on Sunday and 94,838 readers on weekdays. In 1986, The Detroit Free Press delivered 657,000 newspapers on weekdays; now its weekday circulation, limited to Thursdays and Fridays, is about 80,000. The circulation of the Sunday edition of The Kansas City Star was 380,000 in 2002; now it is 66,000. I could go on.
Papers in medium-sized cities have also taken a beating. In South Dakota’s largest city, Sioux Falls, The Argus Leader had roughly 65 people in its newsroom in 2002. Twenty years later, the Gannett-owned newspaper’s newsroom is down to eight people. The Grand Rapids Press in Michigan used to have 150 people in the newsroom, and The Grand Rapids Herald was a strong competitor. Now The Herald is out of business and The Press (part of an amorphous news website named MLive that largely posts generic Michigan news and press releases) prints just three days a week.
The collapse of midwestern newspapers and the loss of their capacity to preserve and promote regional culture is a setback for everyone in the region, but these developments are particularly bad for historians. The formerly robust world of midwestern newspapers used to provide historians with a first draft of history. Now, with so many newspapers barely functional, it will make it difficult for future historians to figure out what precisely happened in the past. A lot of midwestern history simply is not being recorded anymore.
As newspapers are quickly dismantled and their historic buildings sold and veteran reporters are no longer minding the store, one worries what happens to the records of newspapers, their old editions, and their photo archives. Midwestern historical societies and archivists should be on the alert lest critical records be lost in the rapid downsizing and shedding of properties.
The premium placed on good journalism in the not-so-distant past could be seen in the support for major programs like the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, the Missouri School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, and the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. The strength of midwestern newspapers could also be seen in the great writers they produced. Mark Twain started working at newspapers in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Muscatine, Iowa, and Theodore Dreiser wrote for the Chicago newspapers. Abraham Lincoln wrote for The Sangamo Journal and Ernest Hemingway started out at The Kansas City Star. William Allen White shaped the national agenda via his columns written at The Emporia Gazette. The Chicago newspaper scene sparkled with literary wits from Finley Peter Dunne and Ring Lardner to the acerbic Mike Royko and more serious writers and poets such as Hamlin Garland and Carl Sandburg. African American writers also found their voice through prominent newspapers such as The Chicago Defender (where the poet Langston Hughes was a columnist), The Omaha Star, The Detroit Informer, and The Appeal in Minnesota.
The erosion of the influence of midwestern newspapers is accompanied, not surprisingly, by the loss of local input and regional identity. Gannett is a national chain headquartered in Virginia that, starting in the late 1970s, began buying locally-owned newspapers like The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Des Moines Register, The Indianapolis Star, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, The Detroit Free Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and others. In 2019 Gannett merged with GateHouse Media, which is based in New York and is owned by the New Media Investment Group, which is managed by Fortress Investment Group, a New York private-equity firm which is owned by Softbank, a Japanese conglomerate, and the resulting entity constitutes the largest American newspaper chain.
The ownership, control, and management details are hard to follow. Some say all the mergers and acquisitions and wheeling and dealing has resulted in so much debt that these entities are desperate to slash costs anywhere they can so they can pay the creditors, which may explain why managers seem to be destroying assets and brands that still had value and alienating devoted readers by starving newsrooms of resources (instead of cutting fat, one St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter said, the newspaper chains are going for the “bone and the limbs and the non-essential organs”).
Old time family-owned companies which had paid off their debt decades in the past did not face these pressures and tended to remain community-oriented stewards of a newspaper, making sure critical events received the necessary news coverage and relying on local people to handle layout, design, and printing instead of offshoring these tasks, whether outside the state, region, or even country.
While the details of the new ownership structures and financing arrangements of newspaper chains are murky, the loss of local touch and place-based awareness in now-desolate midwestern newsrooms is hard to miss. Local news is vanishing. Much of the content of midwestern newspapers now comes in the form of national wire stories. Long-time veteran reporters with many local connections (and larger salaries) are often replaced by recent college graduates with few community ties.
The regional flavor and perspective carried on in former years by fully-staffed and locally-owned papers are gone. Colonel McCormick at the old Chicago Tribune may have had some idiosyncrasies, but he always sought to project a midwestern point of view and highlight regional concerns and to contest the power of New York to set the public agenda (he even advocated moving the national capital to Grand Rapids). The Cleveland newspaper embraced a midwestern subtlety, adopting the name Plain Dealer to emphasize its avoidance of sensationalism and its promotion of “democracy and modesty.”
Many other midwestern newspapers were also firmly rooted in their communities and managed by people who were committed to promoting the health of their cities and states and maintaining their independence from national trends and resisting the cultural power of the coasts. These newspapers with their locally-based and Midwest-oriented editors and reporters were organs of cultural regionalism, which nurtured and amplified local and regional voices which were being drowned out in the din of mass culture. “When a newspaper dies in America,” Richard Rodriguez once explained, “it is not simply that a commercial enterprise has failed; a sense of place has failed.”
While the overall picture is grim, some caveats are in order. The old order, of course, was far from perfect. Editors of large and powerful newspapers could be unfair, distort news coverage, and otherwise fail to meet the ideals of the journalism profession. The collapse of midwestern newspapers is also not simply the fault of greedy national chains. Major changes in reading habits, the coming of television and then the internet, and the loss of easy income in the form of classified ads and public notices made it impossible to continue the old traditions.
The rise of new, nimbler internet-oriented publications have done some work to fill the gap left by the fall of the big dailies. The Dakota Scout in South Dakota is a leading example and a model for the region. Newspapers spun off by the big chains and revived under local ownership, such as the Indianola Record-Herald in Iowa, are also a welcome sign of a new era, as is the creation of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, which shares commentary with local Iowa newspapers. More broadly, a greater number of people can also have a voice now via blogs, Twitter, and Substack than could ever have been heard when a narrower range of people decided what news was fit to print. Some locally owned newspapers such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune and smaller organizations such as Forum Communications in Fargo also seem to be faring better than the large-scale, debt-burdened national chains.
The Midwest is a big, civically-inclined region so the situation can be improved with some gumption and teamwork as we all adjust to the post-newspaper chain era. All these things can be true and we can still rightly pine for a big newspaper to sit down to coffee with and read about what is happening in the area and ponder what some well-grounded and fully-sourced local columnists are opining about that day. As for the future, we need some ideals in mind—but also clear eyes and a sober understanding of the difficulties ahead—to make things better. “Stick with the optimists,” Jimmy Reston used to say, because “it’s going to be tough enough even if they’re right.”
Jon K. Lauck is the author, most recently, of The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900. A professor of history and political science at the University of South Dakota, he is editor-in-chief of Middle West Review, from which this essay was adapted.