J. TODD FOSTER: The Newspaper Industry Must Evolve

Part of my job is to stay abreast of newspaper industry trends. Lets just say its the only depressing part of my job.

By my reckoning, well more than 1,000 American journalists lost their jobs in recent days through layoffs and buyouts. Thankfully, none of those occurred in this newsroom.

But ours is clearly an imperiled industry, as more and more advertisers and readers migrate to the Internet. The downward spiral is exacerbated by a general economic malaise besetting the entire country.

Some financial analysts have gone so far as to predict the demise of newspapers by as soon as 2018.

I think those predictions are hugely pessimistic and that the reality will vary community to community, but there is no denying that newspapers should be listed under an industry version of the Endangered Species Act.

The Albuquerque (N.M.) Tribune, for example, shut its doors earlier this year. This is a paper that in 1994 won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Big-city newspapers are in considerably more imminent danger than community newspapers like ours. Its very possible that one day in the not so distant future, no American city save for New York will have more than one daily newspaper; few cities have two newspapers now. Theres even talk that San Francisco is on the verge of losing its only newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle reportedly has lost $1 million a week since 2000. You read that right.

While the Bristol Herald Courier is on much safer ground than its metro counterparts, particularly those in real estate-ravaged California and Florida, we are not immune to the industrys travails.

Its incumbent upon us to create new revenue streams and to enhance our news Web site, TriCities.com. Meanwhile, we have to keep a close eye on our expenses, the two largest being salaries and the very paper youre holding in your hands at this moment.

The paper we use is called newsprint, and its price tag looks like the changing marquees at gas stations on an upward trajectory with seemingly no end in sight and currently above $700 per metric ton.
Weve been forced to cut our expenses like everyone else, but have elected to do it in creative ways to minimize the impact on the printed product.

That is why starting July 15, you will see a slightly narrower Bristol Herald Courier. Beginning with that Tuesday edition, our newspaper will be one inch narrower than it is today. The savings will equate to roughly 8 percent of our annual newsprint bill, which is staggering.

We are far from the first newspaper to do this; several newspapers owned by Gannett, the countrys largest newspaper chain, went to this format earlier this year, as did the Scripps-owned Knoxville News Sentinel. This narrower format is quickly becoming the industry standard.

While we are the first Media General Inc. paper to use the narrower format, the rest in our company will follow by the end of 2009. We were selected as the guinea pig because our state-of-the-art press enables us to make the change at virtually no cost and with minimal interruption.

The newspapers that adopted this narrower format before us discovered some advantages beyond cost savings. Readers in those markets have reacted positively to the easier handling of the smaller newspaper. There also is the obvious ecological benefit of saving a few trees.

But unlike some of the others that have transitioned to a narrower page, we have no plans to sacrifice any local content. On the contrary, we hope to enhance our locally produced offerings through additional freelance hires.

The only noticeable content change will be shorter national and international stories generated by The Associated Press.

We are telling you all this now because we believe in the no-surprise rule. We want you to know what to expect nine mornings from now when you pull your July 15 newspaper from your box or front porch.

Change is not always good. But change in the newspaper industry is an absolute must. Our survival as an industry depends on it.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at or (276) 645-2513.