Jack Shafer, a senior media writer, discussed the possibility that consumers of local news should pay more attention to who runs their newspaper, and possibly cancel subscriptions to better serve journalism.
But when you pay for a newspaper, you’re also making a decision to send money to whoever owns it. And if you really care about local news, you might want to think twice about continuing your subscription to one of the 50-plus dailies operated by Alden Global Capital under the Digital First Media nameplate in Denver, Detroit, Long Beach, San Jose, Boston, St. Paul, and other smaller cities. Good journalism still gets done at these newspapers because reporters care. But less and less of it gets printed, because Alden owner Randall Smith and his right-hand man, Heath Freeman, don’t care about the news. As newspaper industry analyst Ken Doctor has amply documented, Alden is cannibalizing its papers for profit in a way that should repel subscribers.
Shafer revealed papers that I have read frequently, including the San Jose Mercury News and Orange County Register, whose newsrooms have shrunk drastically in an assault on local news, as Alden continues to rake in subscription revenues but invests less of those earnings in the journalism itself.
Don’t ask what my breaking point would be if I lived in an Alden town, because I’m a newspaper dead-ender. But if you pay for a local paper and it provides you little value—and shows no sign of doing so in the future—you have every right to cancel.
However, Shafer wrote that most local newspaper subscribers are older, and thus a reader strike of the paper that could have an actual impact is highly unlikely in towns where Alden owns the papers.
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