Time to consider a new model for America's newspapers

"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light."
--Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart. 1799

Was freedom of the press ever intended to be only for the men -- or women -- who own the presses?

That's the way we look at it now, when "press" has been extended to mean "media," and the constitutional protection given to newspapers has been claimed by radio, television and Internet outlets.

It's like the old joke about the Golden Rule, that he who has the gold makes the rules. The ownership of our newspapers has gone from people who love journalism, people who bleed ink, to people who care for little more than the balance sheet.

Thousands of journalism jobs were cut across the country last year not because the companies that owned them were in trouble, or because they were failing to show a profit. Oh, sure, some exceptions prove the rule. But the Rupert Murdochs, the Sam Zells and the Dean Singletons cut, combine and consolidate because they need outrageously high profit margins to handle the massive amounts of debt they took on to expand their companies.

When I was working in Ontario, Calif., in the mid 1990s, something our publisher said always used to annoy me. Mike Ferguson managed the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin for Donrey Media, and he always used to tell us that the Associated Press could cover the Los Angeles Dodgers for us, but only we could cover Ontario High School.

It annoyed me because he was right, and because it meant I didn't get to cover the Dodgers anymore. Up until Media News and Dean Singleton acquired our paper in 1999, we did a bang-up job of covering our local communities. You could get world, national, state and regional news from a lot of sources, but if you wanted to know what was happening in our cities, you had to read the Daily Bulletin.

That's why local newspapers mattered, and why they still matter. There are three cities with population of more than 150,000 in the Bulletin's circulation area, and no one covered them like we did. We had the resources and we cared enough to do the job well.

The Ontario City Council might try to deceive citizens, but we didn't let them get away for it for long. The Chino Valley school board might be a mess, but we made sure the people it served were well aware of it.

We made money, too. I can't deny that the economy was different, but I never understood why a business that made a lot of money during good times shouldn't take some of that money and use it to get through the bad times. You can do that if you're part of a small group, or if you're owned by a family that cares about the news.

You can't do it if you're part of a big corporation with stockholders and debt service. Every quarter has to stand on its own, because Wall Street and the investment banks are always watching.

So Dean Singleton buys papers and then immediately starts looking for ways to cut costs and improve profits. Our newsroom lost 30 percent of its staffing the first year, and that was only the beginning. After that, all sorts of coverages started getting combined, first with the San Bernardino Sun and then with the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Our business section, which was basically a page, went from covering an area from San Dimas in the west to Fontana in the east to one that eventually stretched all the way east to Barstow and up into the Victor Valley. That made it nearly impossible to do something that had been our bread and butter, writing stories about local small businesses.

When Singleton bought the two papers, both the Sun and the Bulletin had a business editor and a business reporter. Four people. By 2007, one person was doing the work those four did eight years earlier.

You can't cover the news that way. All you can do is juggle coverages, eliminating some and adding others and hoping folks won't notice. So we started missing city council meetings, and instead did things like wasting an entire day for a reporter and a photographer trying to catch Lindsay Lohan doing her community service in Pomona.

But there's the balance sheet, and the bean counters will tell you that's all the coverage we can afford. Classified advertising has all but vanished and display advertisers have cut way back and might never return.

No question. It's hard times, but I keep coming back to Jefferson. Remember that he said given the choice between newspapers and government, he would rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers.

We shine the light.

We expose the wrongdoers.

That's our mission. Imagine Watergate without the Washington Post, or with a Washington Post so concerned about its balance sheet that it didn't have the manpower to go after such a longshot of a story.

Yes, newspapers in the current model are in big trouble. But why do we think the current model is the only way to go? Why not accept the possibility that maybe an industry with a constitutional protection ought to be something different? Why not take the profit motive out of it and make newspapers not-for-profit organizations?

It's worth considering.

Otherwise all we're going to see are more and more cuts, less and less coverage and fewer and fewer readers.