Newspapers in the 1980s

NEWSPAPERS IN THE 1980s

Trouble and Change

The traditional view of newspapers—fiercely independent papers run by strong individual personalities with strong local ties and flavors in a competitive local market—continued to be less true in the 1980s. More cities were left with single newspapers, all morning editions, as publishers not facing direct competition in local markets eliminated slowly dying afternoon editions.

Gannett's Influence

The founding of USA Today in 1982 by the Gannett group and its chief executive officer, Allan H. Nueharth, was influential in both newspaper content and design, despite Nueharth's stated intention that the paper was a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, local newspapers. But in an era when more and more people chose to get their news and information from television, USA Today taught lessons different from those intended by Neuharth.

Splashy Layout

USA Today featured a splashy layout with lots of color; short news articles with little analysis; a heavy emphasis on sports; and weather, business, and entertainment snippets for travelers. By 1986 its daily circulation was 1.17 million copies, though Neuharth claimed 4.8 million daily readers. Although the paper was a circulation success, it proved a money loser well into the 1990s. Still, its circulation success put great pressure on daily newspapers throughout the country.

Pressure on Independents

Gannett's success with its flagship paper—in 1990 the company owned eighty-one daily newspapers and sixty-five Sunday papers—focused attention on those newspapers that could afford the investment in technology required to compete with USA Today and splashy competitors in the television medium. Increasingly that investment was possible only for large newspaper groups—corporations that owned multiple newspapers in markets throughout the country—and independent daily newspapers came under increasing pressure both financially and editorially.

Power of Conglomeration

By the end of the 1980s there were 135 newspaper publishing groups with 1,228 newspapers. There were only 383 independent daily newspapers. Cost pressures and dwindling circulation caused many independent newspapers to close or sell out to the conglomerates. The Gannett group continued its expansion first begun in 1964. In 1981 it bought El-Diaro-La Prensa, the Spanish-language tabloid in New York City. In 1985 and 1986 Gannett spent $635 million to buy papers in Detroit, Des Moines, and Louisville and the Arkansas Gazette. The Knight-Ridder group bought the Columbia (S.C.) State and the Columbia Record in 1986. The Hearst Newspaper group bought the Houston Chronicle in 1987.

Closures

Many papers, both great and small, closed during the 1980s. In 1982 the Washington Star, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Buffalo Courier-Express, and the Cleveland Press all ceased publication. The Memphis Press-Scimitar closed in 1983, and the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen-Journal closed in 1986. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Baltimore News-American, both papers more than one hundred years old, closed in 1986. In 1989 the Hearst Corporation closed its Los Angeles paper, the Herald Examiner.

Openings

Despite the decline in the number of U.S. newspapers—over the ten-year period from 1981 to 1991 the number of general-circulation dailies declined from 1,745 to 1,611—there were a handful of start-ups of interest in the 1980s besides USA Today. The Long Island, New York, tabloid Newsday, founded in 1940 by Alicia Patterson but controlled since 1970 by the Times Mirror group, started New York Newsday in 1985. The Manhattan-based evening tabloid featured such writers as Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hammill. Although the paper won awards for its local news coverage and added to competitive pressures facing the New York Post and the New York Daily News, it was not able to post a profit. Times Mirror closed New York Newsday in 1995.

Higher Costs

As they had since the late 1930s, newspaper production costs rose during the 1980s. Ink and newsprint account for 25 percent of the cost of a newspaper. Between 1981 and 1988 the average price of news-print rose by more than 50 percent, on top of an increase of almost 200 percent between 1973 and 1981. Ink also went up substantially in price. Faced with rising costs and greater competition from radio and television for advertising dollars, newspapers increased both subscription and advertising rates—moves which tended to exacerbate circulation and advertising problems. That higher cost to both readers and advertisers helps to explain the decline in the number of people who read more than one daily newspaper, from 28 percent in 1970 to 15 percent in 1987.

Joint Operating Agreements

The rise in costs and the seeming inability of cities to support more than one newspaper led to a rise in joint operating agreements (JOA), arrangements in which two competing newspapers shared printing and business operations while maintaining separate editorial staffs. One of the more interesting JOAs began in 1989 between the Detroit Free Press, owned by Knight-Ridder, and the Detroit News, owned by Gannett. Concerns were raised about the nature of the agreements and whether the two papers were truly independent voices.

An Uncertain Future

The continued rapid pace of change in the newspaper industry has led many commentators to predict the end of the traditional newspaper and its replacement by various media products, from facsimile machine news sheets to Internet computer news outlets and global satellite television news channels. Still, newspapers are an integral part of the cultural history of the United States and remain an important source of local, national, and international information. The challenge for the daily newspaper, both those owned by local interests and those owned by large corporations, is to remain profitable while retaining readership and giving their product a community flavor.

MEMORY LANE

One of the unsung success stories of commercial television was Joe Franklin, who in 1985 entered the Guinness Book of World Records when he broad-cast episode number 21,050 of his long-running talk show, The Joe Franklin Show, on station WO R in New York City. In the thirty-six years his talk show had been on the air, Franklin had hosted thousands of guests, including rising young stars such as Woody Allen and Barbra Striesand. Just as likely to appear on the show, however, were unknown, frankly mediocre performers such as Judi Jourdan of the Shower Singers and pianist Irving Fields, who had appeared on The Joe Franklin Show more than four hundred times.

Franklin plied his trade in relative obscurity for years until the 1980s, when WOR made the move to nationwide cable. Soon, as Franklin liked to report, he had grown beyond his limited New York City viewership and become "hot with the campus crowd." Perhaps he gained the most attention when comic Billy Crystal began to do a devastating parody of his schmoozing, product-hawking style on NBC's Saturday Night Live. But Franklin was philosophical about Crystal's caricature: "He was doing a satire of a satire. 'Cause I'm putting the world on. That's something only a select few can see."

Source:

Ron Powers, The Beast, the Eunuch, and the Glass-yed Child (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

Source:

Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media, seventh edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall, 1992).