The collapse of the old model
The old-school assumption among the better newspaper companies — that if they published good newspapers, people would buy them — has been under siege for years.
 
The movement of readers, particularly young ones, to the Internet is just one of the dramatic changes facing media companies. The consolidation of department stores, classified ads’ movement to sites like craigslist.com and monster.com, and Wall Street’s earnings demands for publicly traded media companies have all taken a toll.
 
In the short run, the problem with the continued slide in newspaper circulation, according to Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Washington, DC-based Project for Excellence in Journalism, “is that it helps cement the reputation that the newspaper industry is a quote-unquote mature industry, past its prime, has seen better days, and it tells a couple of stories.” One of the factors propelling steady declines in readership is the failure of newspapers, unlike in previous generations, to capture a younger demographic of readers.
 
All this “has an impact on the psyche of advertisers,” notes Jurkowitz, a former Boston Phoenix staffer, and makes it very difficult to predict how things will change over the next five or 10 years.
 
According to Belo’s 2006 annual report, “The audience story is one of growth through innovation and cultivating dynamic relationships with our local communities. The total audience reach of each Belo newspaper and its associated Web site has increased by a double-digit percentage over the last five years.” The report notes how the corporation’s online revenue has grown dramatically, from $7.5 million in 2000 to $64 million in 2006.
 
Jurkowitz, however, says media companies face a more complex situation. While online ad revenue has grown rapidly in recent years, the sheer pace of the growth made some slowing inevitable, fostering concern that the online revenue stream won’t replace its print counterpart as quickly or as seamlessly than some people thought. It also remains to be seen if advertisers will accept ABC’s Audience-Fax compilation of print and online readership as a metric. Either way, some traditional revenue sources — such as classified advertising – aren’t about to return, undermining some of the longstanding financial foundation for journalism.
 
And while ProJo managers are presumably pleased by the increased Web traffic that has come with the heightened emphasis on high school football, it’s hard, for now at least, to know the value of these readers. Some, for example, might be college students and transplants in another state, checking in on their old school, yet unlikely to support Rhode Island-based advertisers.

Newspapers' leaner future
One big question for the broader news industry is who, beyond top papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, will continue to subsidize quality journalism. (The recent emergence of ProPublica, a privately funded effort to support investigative reporting, offers one alternative approach.)
 
Jurkowitz poses a related query: if a new Web-based model emerges and becomes sustaining, will some of the losses faced by newspapers — the shuttering of foreign bureaus, fewer beats, the layoffs of staff, and so forth — be recouped, or will news organizations continue to operate “lean and mean”?
 
In Rhode Island, if the ProJo seems unlikely to restore the larger staff and broader scope it once had, the paper is nonetheless exhibiting relative calm — which, by newspaper standards, is impressive.
 
“I think everyone accepts that it’s a tough time for the industry, and people are not expecting things to get dramatically better in the near future, but I have a sense of everyone hanging in there,” says medical reporter Felice Freyer. “I don’t get a feeling of crisis in the newsroom right now, and that might just be where I am, but people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”
 
While the extent to which the Web may help to underwrite the printed paper remains unknown, Tim Schick, president of the Providence Newspaper Guild, describes the Journal as being relatively well-positioned for the future. Even with further slippage in circulation, he doesn’t envision the dismantling of the paper’s State House or investigative teams.
 
Despite slowing revenue, the Journal remains profitable and it has fared better than both larger papers that have been hurt by advertising consolidation, like the Boston Globe, and smaller ones, like the Times of Pawtucket and the Call of Woonsocket, whose staffs have been decimated by management, Schick says. While Stop & Shop and Shaw’s pulled their flyers in favor of direct mail about a year ago, he says, the Journal — which has maintained a constant number of reporters in the last few years — has benefited from a more insulated and less competitive marketplace.
 
So if some cuts, like the paper’s decision to no longer cover Boston Celtics and Boston Bruins games, are made since the information can be readily obtained on the Web, the Journal can likewise be expected to continue raising its own local Internet focus, with the addition of video and other logical attractions.
 
The ProJo isn’t without sharp challenges, from the weakening of circulation in Providence, due likely to the emergence of a heavily Latino minority-majority population, to the existential crisis facing all newspapers.
 
Yet the paper has remained profitable long enough to go through some dramatic reinventions — from a fiercely Republican newspaper to a small gem of American journalism, to name perhaps the most profound — during its 178-year history.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@thephoenix.com . Read his politics + media blog at  thephoenix.com/notfornothing .