The New York Times reported earlier this month it has surpassed 10 million subscribers in its quest to reach its goal of 15 million. It’s surely a major milestone for the newspaper and bears noting that 9.3 million of those subscribers — or 93 percent — are digital readers.
That’s fairly astonishing considering two decades ago most newspapers were still giving away content for free on the web under the assumption it would drive people to buy print subscriptions and that online advertising would be gravy and only increase over time. Instead, the big gorillas of Facebook, Google, and YouTube soon arrived on the scene, siphoning away digital and — eventually — print ad revenue.
The rise of the paywall followed. Then came the metered paywalls.
Whatever the recipe, the Times seems to have perfected it for its level. The Old Gray Lady reported not only impressive gains in readership in the third quarter but also a significant increase in adjusted operating profit.
Nearly 220 million American adults turn to their local newspapers regularly for news and information they need to stay informed, feel more connected to their neighbors and improve their lives and communities.
Benji Hamm
That readership number is based on a recent national study by independent research firm Coda Ventures for the America’s Newspapers organization.
Most likely, the number of readers is higher. Many people who say they receive news on their phone or from social media instead of newspapers fail to understand that the sources for those stories are often journalists at U.S. newspapers.
We sometimes take the work of journalists for granted, but those who work at newspapers are filling an important role in the health of our communities and country.
Newspaper revenues are a fraction of what they once were. All that ad revenue has gone to Google and the other Internet mega platforms.
It’s not that we don’t have the eyeballs. If you include our websites, we have more readers than ever before. Our problem is we don’t have the scale to run a massive spying apparatus like Google, Apple and Facebook.
Few developments have sent a shock wave through the media industry this century like the law enforcement raid on the Marion County Record in Kansas Aug. 11.
The massive overreach of authority has been contextualized in the days since when it became apparent the newspaper — particularly aggressive for its size — had been delving into the employment history of the community’s new police chief. What followed the Record’s inquiry into Chief Gideon Cody was a response hardly seen in a country where the freedom of the press is enshrined in the constitution.
After a local woman alleged to the chief that the newspaper had illegally accessed her driving record, police unleashed a raid that encompassed the newspaper’s office as well as that of the home of its editor. A day later, the editor’s mother, who also resided in the home and was there when the cops rifled through the place, collapsed and died.
Writing a tribute to a writer bristles with difficulties. That is particularly the case when writing a tribute to Hodding Carter III, who died recently at age 88. It is important to get beyond the basic facts.
The basic facts can be found in the national newspaper obituaries. Hodding grew up in Greenville in the shadow of a father who edited the Delta Democrat-Times, won a Pulitzer Prize, and wrote books, most notably the autobiographical “Where Main Street Meets the River.” Hodding graduated from Princeton in 1957 and turned his senior thesis into a good book of his own, “The South Strikes Back,” the story of the White Citizens Council. After service in the Marines, Hodding returned to Greenville to run the newspaper just as the civil rights fights heated up in the 1960’s.
As an editor he championed civil rights for black people and expressed optimism that school desegregation would help the south progress. He became a “Mississippi Loyal Democrat.” He helped lead its racially-integrated delegation that won the fight to be seated at the 1968 Democratic convention. In the late 1970’s he moved to Washington D.C. and served as press spokesman for President Jimmy Carter’s State Department. Later he originated a PBS program, Inside Story, that won Emmy Awards. He presided over the Knight Foundation in Miami, and taught at several colleges.
“She puts her heart and soul into the good of this community, making this a better place to live.” —Anne Weissinger of Rolling Fork on Natalie Perkins
The cadence of Natalie Perkins’ voice when we spoke March 27 was an anguished concoction of exhaustion and raw emotion.
Her frame of mind was even more apparent when she called in that same day to the MPB Think Radio program “Now You’re Talking” with Marshall Ramsey. She was utterly overwhelmed.
Within 24 hours of our conversation, Natalie — who serves in the dual role of editor of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork and as assistant emergency management agency director in Sharkey County — was at a makeshift desk at her home in Anguilla, about five miles away from Rolling Fork where the now infamous EF-4 twister demolished most of town. She was editing and paginating that week’s edition of the Deer Creek Pilot, a small paper in a smaller town in one of the nation’s most impoverished regions.
The newspaper office, on the banks of namesake Deer Creek, was somehow spared. It is almost as if the spirit of longtime editor Ray Mosby, who died in 2021, was there to warn it against striking the newspaper. Ray would surely have known — as Natalie doubtless does — the newspaper was going to be too integral to the recovery effort that was surely to follow such devastation.
The first time I recall hearing the phrase “absence of malice” was from a film of that title released in 1981 starring Paul Newman and Sally Field.
Layne Bruce
Newman plays a liquor wholesaler falsely accused in the disappearance of a local union leader and whose life is wrecked when the news hits the papers. Field is the reporter who’s manipulated by a corrupt district attorney who wants to squeeze Newman for information about another case.
It’s a convoluted work of fiction, but it’s one of my favorite movies about journalism and what can go wrong when people motivated by careerism forget that their actions can have very real and dramatic consequences for many people around them.
After studying journalism in college, I came to understand “absence of malice” as a legal term that also represents an incredibly high burden of proof that must be met by litigants who claim they’ve been defamed by the press.
When a plaintiff sues a media outlet for defamation, they must prove that whatever inaccuracies the outlet reported were borne of actual malicious intent. In other words, the defendants in such cases must act intentionally and spread false information knowingly.
Bills have been introduced in this year’s session of the Mississippi Legislature that would clarify two important issues.
House Bill 633 (a copy of it is Senate Bill 2204) would provide an opportunity for a court hearing to have a public body’s action invalidated if the vote occurred during a meeting that violated the state Open Meetings Act.
This is a proper consideration. If a board approved something behind closed doors that should have been done before the public, the best penalty — even better than fining board members personally — is to reverse the action.
Doing that would send a public signal that the officials were violating the law. Ignoring this bill could encourage more secrecy, because other public officials could decide to do the same thing, essentially asking for forgiveness later instead of permission in advance.
The House bill is flexible on the issue. It says a judge can void any action of a public body wrongly handled in secret “if the court determines that the public interest in voiding the action taken outweighs the public interest of sustaining the action itself.” The proposal also sets a sensible two-year limit on going to court to get a board’s decision reviewed.
The second matter involves whether the Open Meetings Law applies to the Legislature itself. The state Ethics Commission decided last year that the law did not specify this. Senate Bill 2667 would add a few words to the Mississippi Code to change that.
The Ethics Commission’s decision came in a case where a reporter for the Mississippi Free Press was not allowed to attend a meeting of the House Republican Caucus. The reporter contended that since a majority of House members would be there, it constituted a quorum. And since legislative business would be discussed, the meeting should have been open to the public.
House Speaker Philip Gunn contended the Open Meetings Act does not specifically apply to the Legislature, and a majority of the Ethics Commission basically agreed with that assessment. But it makes no sense to hold virtually every other public board in Mississippi to a high standard of openness, while having a lower standard for the public officials with the most power and influence in the state.
The Senate bill would solve this problem by specifically identifying the Legislature as a public body that is covered by the Open Meetings Act. The bill deserves strong consideration, but may run into resistance from some Republicans, who hold a majority of the seats in both the House and Senate, and thus would be affected.
Jack Ryan is editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb.
JACKSON—State Auditor Shad White made comments about illegally closed meetings in Mississippi during a recent Stennis Press Luncheon in Jackson that piqued my interest. He said any actions taken in them should be invalidated under state law.
Layne Bruce
That’s something MPA has maintained for years. In fact, we’ve had bills before the legislature for several sessions now that would strike any actions taken in government meetings that are eventually deemed to have been illegally closed to the public.
The bills have never advanced beyond committee. For as much lip service as is often paid to “transparency” in government, few public officials demonstrate much desire to change the status quo, which, ridiculously, only slaps public bodies on their wrists for shutting meeting doors when they should be wide open.
Under existing law, even if the Mississippi Ethics Commission rules that a meeting was wrongly closed to the public, there’s not much more that can be done about it other than tell the offending body “don’t do that again.” And whatever actions they took in an illegally closed meeting are allowed to stand.
The remarkable speed at which vaccines were developed in late 2020 and early 2021 was truly a wonder of modern science, but when most of us were getting our first doses last year we probably thought a return to normal was much closer than it turned out to be.
At the Association, we were able to pull off a summer convention in July 2021 — albeit it smaller with a more condensed agenda — that fell into the “sweet spot” before the emergence of the Delta variant of Covid again put a clamp on in-person events. Going into the holidays of 2021, it appeared we’d be able to host our annual Mid-Winter Conference in conjunction with the annual Foundation Celebrity Roast and McDavid student media conference in person during January.
Then the aggressive Omicron variant emerged and quickly upended all plans for the first quarter of 2022.
Those three major Association and Foundation events were all supposed to happen on the dates of Jan. 20-22. But Mid-Winter ended up being delayed a month; McDavid was rescheduled for March; and the Roast of Sen. Roger Wicker landed in late April to accommodate his schedule.
To put it simply, we’ve become experts at “rolling with it.”
The Wicker Roast, though three months delayed, was particularly gratifying to pull off. It raised enough money to cover the budget for the annual MPA Education Foundation Intern program, and the whole evening was fun and lively for the honoree and for Association members and the public who attended.
Now we turn our attention to other upcoming events important to the Association and our members.
AFTER A COUPLE of Covid-related false starts, our plan to host a series of Community Forums across the state is back on the front burner.
The first of these is planned for June 8 in Cleveland and will be hosted in conjunction with the Bolivar Bullet. The second is a day later in Tupelo hosted with the Daily Journal team.
These forums will focus on a local topic and seek to position newspaper media as the trusted platform for the discussion of important community issues. MPA’s involvement is part of a national coalition called the Relevance Project, founded in 2020 to help strengthen the image of local newspaper media and help them reinforce their franchise’s role in the “town square.”
You can read more about the Community Forum concept here. It’s spearheaded by Tom Silvestri, executive director of the Relevance Project and the retired longtime publisher of the Richmond (Va.) Times Dispatch. Tom is acting as a coach for local papers who are bringing the concept to their communities.
Whether these forums draw 20 people or 200 to attend, they’re a vital step in helping newspaper media preserve their local franchise and promote them as critical in discussion of community issues.
SOON AFTER THE June forums, we’ll gather in Memphis for our first Tri-State Press Convention since 2010. We are fortunate to be working again with the Arkansas and Tennessee press associations to build a strong agenda that will include beneficial programs focused on industry tropics with a large representation of newspaper media partners and vendors on hand.
Such leading industry speakers as Kelly Wirges, Russell Viers, and Bill Ostendorf will present programs on topics such as newspaper marketing and branding, freedom of information, and the latest technology.
Inkblots 