Stop the Presses

Just three weeks before the 15th anniversary of the closing of The Houston Post – yeah, I know, I didn’t think it had been that long, either – here comes a film that confirms our worst suspicions: Things have only gotten worse for the newspaper industry since the Post was toasted. Stop the Presses, a critically acclaimed documentary co-directed by Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza, will have its H-Town premiere Saturday, March 27, in the Performing Arts Center at the Spring Branch campus of Houston Community College, 1010 West Sam Houston Parkway North.

The 8 p.m. screening will be preceded by a 7 p.m. reception – complete with free soft drinks, popcorn and balloons for the kiddies (OK, I made up the part about the balloons) -- for visiting filmmakers Birnbaum and Mendoza, who’ll hang around for a post-screening panel discussion with such luminaries as Kyrie O'Connor and Bob LeVitus of The Houston Chronicle and… and.. well, and me. (But don’t let that keep you away.)

Be forewarned: Stop the Presses is not a pretty picture. “The American newspaper’s vital role as public watchdog is in danger,” co-director Mendoza insists. “Circulation and revenue have plunged as readers and advertisers flee to the Internet, thousands of journalists have been laid off or bought out, and stockholders have forced top news organizations out of business.” Stop the Presses “takes viewers inside disheartened newsrooms to document the devastation,” Mendoza says, “and into the community to learn what readers think of journalism’s fate.” Among the on-screen interviewees: Ben Bradley, Dave Barry, Ed Asner (who isn’t really a newspaper editor, but played one on TV) and the late, great Walter Cronkite.

Stop the Presses – which will be presented in Houston by the Real Films series of The Documentary Alliance -- premiered at the AFI Dallas Film Festival in April 2008. Since then, The Rocky Mountain News in Denver shut down, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer switched over to an on-line only operation. The corporate parents of many other prestigious papers -- including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and The Denver Post — have sought bankruptcy protection, And earlier this week, the Associated Press reported that, according to figures released by the Newspaper Association of America, U.S. newspaper advertising revenue across the board last year plunged 27 percent to its lowest level since 1986.

“If we had known the situation was going to get this bad,” Mendoza says, “we might have gone with our original subtitle -- Death of the American Newspaper.” Yikes.

Tickets for Stop the Presses will be $10 for general admission, and $5 for HCC students with ID. But wait, there’s more: An autographed DVD of the film will be given away as a door prize.

OK, this explains everything...

This must be why I haven't been able to get another full-time newspaper job since The Houston Post shut down in 1995. Well, either this, or I really suck as a writer.

Newspaper circulation continues decline

Given my occasional contributions to The Houston Chronicle, I naturally have a vested interest in that newspaper's continued existence. But, geez, as a professional journalist -- and, dammit, as an inveterate newspaper reader --I am flat-out scared by the new circulation numbers recorded across the board by papers everywhere in the U.S.

Flashback: 1985

Way, way back when newspapers were making money, and could afford promotional TV ads for their star writers, this Houston Post spot got some heavy rotation -- even on the big Astrodome screens during Astros games! -- throughout the Greater Houston Area, circa 1985. And yes, that really is the great Jack Riley of The Bob Newhart Show applying prickly wit to burst my overinflated ego. (Again: Thanks to Robert Clark.)

Are you ready to start getting what you pay for?

James Surowiecki of The New Yorker on the future (or the lack thereof) of newspapers: "The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the [New York] Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product...

"[I]t would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime — intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on — and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is."

Newspapers can be saved

From Advertising Age: "[T]he doomsayers still can be proved wrong. U.S. newspapers could be fixed if they could just be pried from the hands of those who milk them for short-term gain and are either woefully ignorant of where readers are going or miserably negligent in terms of investing in that future."

All the news that's fit to print may not be printed

Business Week columnist Jon Fine sees some newspapers drastically shrinking, and others disappearing altogether, in the not-so-distant future. Indeed, he believes "one or more major American markets will lose their daily newspaper within 18 months." The good news: Bloggers and websites will pick up some of the slack. The bad news: "Newspapers still do some things that can't be replaced. Unfortunately, we're about to find out exactly what those things are." I would argue that we already know what one of those things is: Making the general public (as opposed to diehard movie buffs and sophisticated cineastes) aware of underhyped indie and art-house movies that aren't backed by mega-expensive multimedia ad campaigns.

Something to think about the next time you hear about a drop in movie attendance, or read about a decline in voting, or...

This distressing factoid was buried below the lede in a Bloomberg news report yesterday: “U.S. newspapers' daily circulation fell 30 percent to 43.7 million in September from 62.3 million in 1985...”

Now, of course, many of the lost readers may now be reading newspaper websites instead. Or they may be reading the sites operated by CNN, MSNBC, etc. Some, I am sure, no longer “read” news at all, but still listen to radio and/or watch TV newscasts. And, yes, of course, many have died.

But how many million have simply unplugged, tuned out or otherwise disengaged, and simply stopped giving a damn?

(And before anyone asks: Yes, I admit, I'm thinking a lot about such news about newspapers right now, since tomorrow marks the 12th anniversary of the closing of The Houston Post.)