Layoffs. Canceled print editions. Weekly papers and small dailies across the country face peril as the coronavirus cuts off ads and live events. Once the Chocolate Pig closed, the paper was in trouble.
Doyle Murphy, the editor in chief of Riverfront Times, a 43-year-old weekly in St. Louis, knew how much the publication depended on ads from the Chocolate Pig, Beast Butcher & Block, the Pat Connolly Tavern and many other restaurants not far from the paper’s headquarters on North 21st Street. Those businesses went dark last week, after the city announced restrictions on dining out to contain the spread of the coronavirus. “These are people who have supported the paper for years,” Mr.
Murphy said in an interview. “That’s when we realized we were going to have to take drastic steps, if we had any hope of coming out of this on the other side. ” Mr. Murphy, who said he had never laid off anyone, told five newsroom employees last week that they were being let go.
The skeleton crew putting out a smaller version of Riverfront Times consists of himself and a web editor, as well as the paper’s music editor and a freelance food critic, who both insisted on working without pay. In an article on the day of the layoffs, Mr. Murphy described the pandemic as “a nearly perfect weapon against alternative weeklies. ” “One of the big problems with all of this is you don’t know when this is going to end,” he said in the interview.
“Even when people can go out of their houses again, it’s going to take a long time for business to come back to what it was. ” The pandemic is one of the biggest stories most publications will ever cover. But it has left many of them struggling to stay solvent. Alternative weeklies and daily papers in small and midsize cities across the United States were already suffering because of the recession last decade, the migration of readers from print to online and the decline of the advertising business.
Since 2004, roughly one-fourth of American newspapers — more than 2,000 — have been lost to mergers or shutdowns, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Most were weeklies. The arrival of the coronavirus shook the industry’s already weakened economic foundation. As ad revenue and the money generated by events sponsored by small publications started to evaporate, many papers have canceled print editions, laid off workers or asked readers for donations.
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Among those affected: Metro Weekly, a magazine about gay issues in Washington, D. C. ; First Touch, a soccer publication in New York; and Gaming Today, a gambling newspaper in Las Vegas. Charleston City Paper, in South Carolina, described the outbreak as a “storm of a disease.
” Pittsburgh City Paper, using a local insult, referred to the crisis as a “jagoff. ” Submerge Magazine in Sacramento wrote that the coronavirus “is poised to decimate” the publication. Indy Week in Durham, N. C.
, likened it to an earthquake that has forced the paper to face “the prospect of weeks or months deep in the red. ” The Pulse of Chattanooga, Tenn. , said last week that it was discontinuing its print edition, and The Isthmus, a weekly in Madison, Wis. , announced that it would “go dark” for a time.
In Halifax, Nova Scotia, The Coast said that, after 27 years, it was going online only and laying off nearly 20 employees. The Chicago Reader will start switching off between PDF and print editions this week. The Stranger, an esteemed alternative weekly founded in 1991 in Seattle, temporarily laid off 18 employees this month, including its managing editor, and suspended print production.
“The publication said 90 percent of its revenue stemmed from ticketing fees and ads for rock clubs, museums, theaters and other venues.”
By creating a “hellscape of unforeseen economic events,” the pandemic has “virtually eliminated this income all at once,” The Stranger reported. Euclid Media Group, the owner of Riverfront Times and six other weeklies, has slashed nearly 80 percent of its work force, said the chief operating officer, Michael Wagner. Those who stayed — a “scrappy crew,” Mr. Wagner called them — accepted significant pay cuts.
The hope, he said, is to hire back as many of them as possible once the crisis is over. Sanford Nowlin, the editor in chief of San Antonio Current, a Euclid Media publication, said the paper’s advertising and events businesses had been strong before the virus made its presence felt in Texas. “This was one of those things that hit us out of the blue,” he said. Larger publications have also made adjustments.
The most drastic response from a major metropolitan daily has come out of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La. , where The Advocate and The Times-Picayune — now one news organization, after The Advocate bought The Times-Picayune last year — will furlough 10 percent of the work force, the editor, Peter Kovacs, said Monday. The furlough will focus on journalists who cover sports and social events, and everyone else will be reduced to four-day workweeks, Mr. Kovacs said.
He attributed the need to declines in ad revenue, even as web traffic and new digital subscriptions have increased substantially. Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, said this month that he anticipated total advertising revenues to drop more than 10 percent in the current quarter amid “uncertainty and anxiety about the virus. ” The losses have been exacerbated by demands by companies that their ads not appear next to articles about death tolls and hospitalizations. Even as readers seek out reporting on the outbreak, “most advertisers are really leery of being anywhere near it,” said Scott McDonald, the chief executive of the Advertising Research Foundation, during a webcast presentation last week.
“This has negative effects for many of the news media that are having to invest more in coverage in this very dangerous moment,” he said. Many companies, however, have run newspaper ads that included references to the pandemic. Safeway took out a full-page ad thanking its employees in The Washington Post. In an ad in The Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section, the Ritz Carlton Residences in Tucson, Ariz.
, promised “safe harbor” and touted multimillion-dollar homes as “something that’ll make your whole family feel more secure — maybe even joyous. ” Even before the pandemic derailed financial markets and disrupted daily life, print advertising was slumping. Brian Wieser, the head of business intelligence at GroupM, the media investing arm of the ad giant WPP, predicted in December that advertising revenue for U. S.
newspapers would decline 11. 5 percent this year, after sinking more than 17 percent in 2019. Magazine revenue would fall nearly 10 percent, according to GroupM’s analysis. Publications are doing what they can.
The Austin Chronicle, in Texas, went from weekly print publication to an every-other-week schedule. The Monterey County Weekly, in California, laid off seven employees, reduced hours for three others and slashed the salary of its founder and chief executive, Bradley Zeve, to $0. Will such moves be enough? In a post headlined “It could be the end,” Jeff vonKaenel, the chief executive of the Sacramento News & Review, wrote that the publication had less than $20,000 in revenue last week to cover $45,000 in production costs.
Starting this week, advertising cuts will force the News & Review and its sibling papers in Chico and Reno to suspend publication and lay off most staff members. For newer outlets that started as online publications, the pandemic has been less damaging, said Jason Bade, the president of Pico, a software start-up that works with digital publications including The Colorado Sun, Block Club Chicago and BoiseDev of Idaho. Those outlets draw most of their revenue from subscriptions or donations, rather than from ads for local businesses, and the urgent news articles of recent weeks have attracted readers willing to pay for news. “Mostly bad news this week,” Mr.
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