Journal Inquirer newspaper franchise is local — and not free

From the schizophrenic complaints about the Journal Inquirer’s requiring a paid subscription to get access to most of the news on its Internet site, you might think you were at a resort in the Catskills: Such lousy food, and such small portions!

That is, why gripe about the price if, as many of the complainers say, they can get a better product elsewhere for less?

The answer, of course, is that in the 17 towns of the Journal Inquirer’s circulation area, you cannot get much local news elsewhere anymore. Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant, has demolished its reporting staff and withdrawn from substantial local news coverage except in a few wealthy Hartford suburbs west of the Connecticut River. Several weekly newspapers, which never contained much, have gone out of business. The free regional weekly, the Reminder, continues to publish but its front page puts banner headlines on notices of potluck suppers in someone else’s town even as the paper is delivered only to driveways and gutters, from which it can be retrieved, sodden after the rain, if it doesn’t blow away first.

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So in the JI’s area, a valuable product, local news, is no longer free. Now it’s either pay or do without. While some people say the newspaper should “innovate� to remain free on the Internet, they don’t suggest any particular innovation, and of course charging a fee for access is an innovation, just one they don’t like.

Advertising on newspaper Internet sites is not an innovation. It was the original idea. But for most papers Internet site advertising has done little to recover the cost of producing the news. Only the largest national news organizations with the largest audiences, audiences not limited by geography, have earned much from Internet site advertising, and lately even that advertising has been mediocre. Advertisers aiming for local and regional audiences don’t want Internet readers who are distant from their stores and services.

Meanwhile, free access to the Internet sites of newspapers has diminished demand for their print products, where advertising does get results and does recover the cost of producing the news.

Some people who have been visiting the JI’s Internet site acknowledge that it is unreasonable to expect anyone to work for free, even as local news is the most expensive sort of news to produce, the news with the fewest people interested in it. So while Internet advertising may sustain national and world news organizations, it is unlikely ever to sustain local, regional, and state news organizations.

Over time there may be other “models� for the production of local, regional and state news. One is operating in Connecticut already — the New Haven Independent, a free-access Internet site concentrating on that city. The Independent does good work but it does not have the scope of many newspapers and it doesn’t operate for free. It survives on grants and donations, and of course any enterprise can ask for donations; charity isn’t much of a “model.�

Hard as times are in the newspaper business, the Internet’s effect on it is not new. While the Internet has fragmented the audience for news, so did radio and then television. Newspapers adapted then, in part by becoming more local. That’s already happening again. While, as a result, less national and international reporting will originate with newspapers, Internet sources may offset that loss to some extent. But so far nothing has even come close to competing with newspapers for the production of local, regional and state news. That seems likely to remain their franchise indefinitely.

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So the big question about newspapers may be a matter of the demand for that kind of news, and the answer may be determined more by the strength of communities and their demographics than by the Internet and the new mechanisms fragmenting the audience.

For newspapers still sell well among intact, self-supporting families that pay attention to their children in school and participate in community life through civic groups, churches, political organizations, and such. Indeed, there can be no community without the chronicling that only newspapers do.

Newspapers do not sell well among broken families who struggle for subsistence on government handouts, move every few months to beat the landlord, and have no interest in community.

The new publisher of New Britain Herald and Bristol Press, Michael Schroeder, suggests that people consider their experience with newspaper Internet sites to have been a long free trial subscription. If they want their local news to continue, they may have to help pay for it.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.