A Newspaper in Step with the Chiefs

Dec 03, 2008, 9:30:24 AM by Rufus Dawes - FAQ

It’s surprisingly ironic that the business that seems to be most in step with the Kansas City Chiefs this year is the local newspaper. Indeed, the daily paper would appear to be losing personnel on a pace with the Chiefs defense. The difference is that, unlike the Chiefs, the paper is all about subtraction of staff, not addition. Does anyone under 40 really read the paper anymore? Four-fifths of Americans once did; today, apparently fewer than half do and that number is dropping at a rate faster than the Chiefs defensive ranking. (Let me now confess I’m still one of them.)

From all appearances, however, the paper is determined to sail on with the Chiefs ship this year. Coverage of the local NFL team remains on course with as many as four writers doing their best to chronicle this most painful of seasons even when it means traveling on the road. The scribes are cranking out Chiefs-related copy at roughly the same rate their industry is shedding jobs. Who’s reading all this I can’t say, but it would appear it’s less than those that show up regularly for Chiefs games, or it soon will be.

Historically, the American media have undergone distinct periods of intense, almost cyclical transition and this decline in newspaper readership coinciding with the growth of what is popularly called “new media” represents another stage in the process of evolution. Newspapers here and throughout the world find themselves having to react and adapt to changes in technological, economic and cultural forces that they could not have anticipated. Warren Buffett, according to Forbes, the richest person in the world, and the largest shareholder of The Washington Post, believes that “the skid will almost certainly continue,” going so far as to say that “simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them would never have existed.”

Strong words, to be sure, but one-time subscribers to the paper are now congregating in enormous numbers on websites and other high-tech portals that function much like the newspapers they have nudged aside. Both sports columnists for the local Kansas City newspaper, perhaps realizing the writing on the wall, now write for national Internet sites as well as their papers which, at one time you can imagine would never have been tolerated. Even President-elect Barack Obama has got into the act, announcing recently that he intends to shift the presidency’s weekly radio address to a weekly video address posted to YouTube.

Newspaper coverage has empowered professional sports almost from the day the leagues got underway, particularly in the case of Major League Baseball. Newspapers have a long symbiotic relationship with the nation’s supposed “national pastime” largely because the papers still call it that. Close to home, the local newspaper’s former sports columnist and later editor received credit for bringing baseball back to Kansas City after the departure of the A’s and went on to serve in some capacity with the baseball franchise in his later retirement years.

While football in Kansas City had no such obvious connection, today it represents a significant investment in time and money for the paper. The paper appears to employ two reporters to cover the team full time and many other feature writers regularly write on a variety of subjects associated with the Chiefs and professional football. While the TV’s can count on fellow stations in faraway cities to deliver pictures and interviews even when they have no staff there, the paper still holds true to the mantra it’s only true if we say it’s true and the only way we can do that is by having a presence at the games and with the team on a daily basis. In other words, boots on the ground, business as usual.

How long this can continue is anyone’s guess. Cuts to staff continue at an alarming rate and advertising dollars shrink with the economic problems of auto dealers, once a staple of local newspaper ads, and other traditional print advertisers. Newspapers traditionally rely on advertising for 80 percent of their revenue, and electronic ads are cheap. Craigslist has cut deep into the newspaper’s once dominant classifieds. Do you suppose any young person today looks to pick up the newspaper to find an available apartment? “Newspapers will never go back to their historical level of profitability,” believes Philip Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina and author of the book, The Vanishing Newspaper.

So, bleeding as they must be, the reporters travel on with the team limping as they go. A solution is hard to come by for a business that, like some NFL teams, has done it the same way for so long.

“You look around and you say, ‘How can you maintain the readership base,’” lamented Los Angeles Times sports editor Bill Dwyre a few years back as readership began to show signs of sharp decline, “If you can’t do it with quantity and fantastic writing and longer stories and better than anybody else…what do you do with it?” As our town’s local newspaper publisher said in a recent column: “it’s up to us to provide the business model.” Trying to rescale the paper in a digital age appears to be the only way out, but to date no one has found a business plan to make that work or acquired sufficient revenue to run something as big as a newspaper.

As newspapers seek to “move to the Internet,” believes Ernest Sotomayor of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, “they’ll still need people who can get hard-to-find information, understand complicated material, assess its veracity, and then present it clearly.”

Seems like a daunting task, almost as tough as evaluating a quarterback.

In a recent column by our local paper’s president and publisher, he asked “for your patience and support as we ride out this recession.” As I read that plea, my first thoughts were of the Chiefs franchise whose staff in other words has asked for the same thing. I admit I’m a dinosaur and newspapers have supplied the bulk of my sports information for most of my life, so I grant them one man’s “patience and support” and ask for only this in return: some of the same when it comes to a local sports franchise that is only asking the same thing.

Sources for this column included David J. Craig, “Breaking News: Wall Street puts the squeeze on newspapers trying to move to the Internet,” Columbia Magazine, Spring 2007; Joseph Epstein, “Are Newspapers Doomed?” Commentary, January, 2006; Frank Ahrens, “Buffet Pessimistic About Newspapers,” The Washington Post, 3 March 2007; Mark Zieman, “Amid Changing times, Your Star Still Shines, Kansas City Star, November 30, 2008; RJ Smith, “Offensive line man,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 2006; Brian Lamb, James L. Loper Lecture in Public Service Broadcasting, USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership, November 20, 2008.

The opinions offered in this column do not necessarily reflect those of the Kansas City Chiefs.

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Prodigiously well-researched, informative and opinionated, Rufus Dawes examines media coverage of the Chiefs occasionally throughout the year.