INI Not Alone In Our Passion for Community Service Journalism
by Joe Smyth
Something interesting is happening in the journalism
business: billionaires are buying newspapers. Not just a copy of the
newspaper, but entire print and digital publishing companies. Amazon’s
Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post. Boston Red Sox owner
John Henry purchased The Boston Globe. And the shrewd old investor
Warren Buffett seems to be avoiding the big cities but purchasing dozens of
newspapers in smaller markets.
Only time will tell whether these new owners will be good or
bad for the newspapers and the communities they serve. I’m betting that,
on the whole, the new owners will bring more good than bad --- especially if
they bring fresh ideas, a culture of success, and a passion for journalism. It
is encouraging that new
Boston Globe owner John Henry
had
this to say to the newspaper’s readers: “I soon realized that one of
the key things the paper needed in order to prosper was private, local
ownership, passionate about its mission.”
I’ve never believed that newspapers should be treated like
Wall Street investments. If a newspaper is going to be worth a damn, it
had better exist for something more than just profit. As journalism
author and educator Dan Kennedy writes in the
Nieman
Journalism Lab, “the newspaper business is not now and never was compatible
with ownership by publicly traded corporations and the quarterly demands of
Wall Street. For more than a generation, corporate chains slashed
newsrooms, first to drive up profit margins, later to stave off mounting
losses. The debt they took on to build their chains is one of the prime reasons
for their inability to set themselves on a new path.”
During the past decade of industry and economic upheaval,
the culprits in our industry have been the chains that snapped up newspapers,
gutted them to maximize profits, and often ended up in bankruptcy. Nearly
everybody got hurt: the newspaper, community, employees, lenders and
vendors. Too often, the only people who got rewarded were the very same
over-paid financial wheeler-dealers who engineered the takeovers and made the
decisions that led them to moral and financial bankruptcy.
The heroes --- along with INI’s local editors and publishers
and their team members --- have been the hundreds of independent local
newspaper owners who did what they had to do to survive without forsaking their
passion for community service journalism.
The new billionaire newspaper owners will surely be an
improvement over the greedy chains that ruined so many decent newspapers over
the past decade. Perhaps they’ll even prove themselves to be as
passionately committed to community service journalism as the smaller local
owners who made their newspapers great long before the big financially-driven
chains came along to do their damage.
Independent Newsmedia Inc. USA will continue to publish
print and digital newspapers, and we’re willing to own more of them when it
makes strategic sense. But we don’t feel driven to buy newspapers that
are already blessed with passionate and mission-driven owners. In our
small way --- often through our printing companies, advertising networks and
the PAGE purchasing cooperative that we co-founded --- INI is committed to
helping other independent publishers thrive.
Our little company is unique because it is owned by a
journalistic trust that allows us to invest all after-tax profits in our
mission of community service journalism. There are no private, family or
institutional owners who can benefit --- now or in the future --- from ripping
off the company, its employees, or the communities we serve.
This allows us to be mission-driven, not just
profit-driven. We still need to be
reasonably profitable to
survive, to stay independent, to improve and to grow --- so we need to be
disciplined and good at what we do. And to thrive long-term, we must also
develop new generations of trustees, directors, editors and publishers who
share our values and will carry forward with the same passion for community
service journalism.
(In 1991 Joe Smyth
transferred 100% ownership of the company to a newly-formed
non-profit journalism trust. He continues as the board chair & CEO of Independent Newsmedia Inc.
USA. He can be
reached at joesmyth@newszap.com )
