With a newspaper gone, who’s the watchdog and where do advertisers go?
Mon, Mar 23, 2009
In response to handwringing over who will keep local government honest should local newspapers fall over, Seamus McCauley of Virtual Economics suggests one way to measure just how effective the newspaper’s been as a watchdog:
if local councils really become unaccountable when local papers cease to investigate them, I’d expect to see a big increase in the value of positions of financial authority at local government level. Those positions will suddenly become a lot more valuable if no-one is watching the purse-strings all that carefully, so more candidates will want them and those candidates will spend more to win them.
It’s possible that what we have here is a rather lovely natural experiment. If a newspaper closes down in a town, what impact does that have on the apparent attractiveness of local government positions in that town? How many more candidates, and how much do they spend on their campaign (especially, possibly, the new candidates)? Measure that, and you can measure the value to accountable democracy that the newspaper used to deliver. Scott Karp said we should measure where the ad dollars go in Seattle now the PI has gone online-only. I think we should measure where the campaign dollars go. Then we’ll know what the watchdog of Seattle democracy was worth.
The reference to the Seattle Post Intelligencer is to its decision to stop printing and publish only online:
The Hearst Corp. announced Monday that it would stop publishing the 146-year old newspaper, Seattle’s oldest business, and cease delivery to more than 117,600 weekday readers.
The company, however, said it would maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation’s largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.
Scott Karp notes this is a golden opportunity to see what happens to print advertising when the newspaper stops publishing in print:
I asked this question a few months ago in theory, but now we get to see what happens in actuality. Logically, one or a combination of the following will happen to the newspaper’s advertising dollars:
- Vaporizes, i.e. the advertiser stops spending the money — given the economic crisis, this seems likely for some advertisers
- Shifts to Seattlepi.com — which is hiring its own sales force following the dissolution of the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times
- Shifts to another newspaper, i.e. Seattle Times — through the JOA, the same sales force sold ads for Seattle PI and Seattle Times, so it only makes sense that some advertisers will shift some or all of their spending to the Times
- Shifts to competing local online media, e.g. The Stranger, West Seattle Blog
- Shifts to non-local media that can target local audiences, e.g. Google, Craigslist
Anyone who runs a newspaper should be watching this experiment under a microscope. Someone should even go so far as to obtain copies of the last month of Seattle PI in print and call up every display advertiser and ask them what they plan to do.
Tags: councils, economics, seattlepi.com, watchdog
The end of printing the Seattle PI does not mean the end of newspapers in Seattle. Seattle was a two-newspaper town, now it’s a one newspaper town, with the Seattle Times still printing daily. We also have a world class weekly with a reputation for occational investigative journalism, the Seattle Stranger.
This experiment will have to wait until we get a zero-newspaper town. Possibly San Francisco (but then, since the Chron is so bad already, its basically already a zero newspaper town….)
Thanks Mark. It’ll be interesting to see how much advertising the Times and Stranger pick up then.
Love the name of the Seattle Stranger. Don’t think we’ve ever had any Strangers in New Zealand. A few Chronicles, several Times, a couple of Heralds certainly, but no strangers.