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In September 2022, Linda Heath, the associate publisher of The South Alabamian, welcomed a reliable—and regular—source into her office in Jackson, Ala. After walking past photos of locomotives, churches, and unpaved streets from Jackson’s early years, Tony McClinton sat down in Heath’s office with a mug of hot coffee. Then McClinton—who delivered Jackson weeklies and the Mobile daily for 41 years—delivered a bombshell: The Mobile Press-Register would print no more. Ditto for The Huntsville Times and The Birmingham News.

Despite the bad news about the ­collapse of print journalism across her state, Heath still enjoyed her visit with McClinton. He still comes for coffee every day though he hasn’t worked for Heath’s paper in years.

That kind of human connection within communities was in part what once made newspapers vital. But like newsprint itself, the human side of the business is vanishing. The three papers McClinton mentioned planned to cease printing by late February and move online only—a fact that garnered national attention. Heath’s paper, which covers local news for Jackson’s population of 6,000, is still hanging on. But where The South Alabamian once employed 20 people, Heath is one of only four left. Across the nation, the decline is no less staggering.

In The State of Local News 2022, a report by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, primary author Penny Abernathy deemed the loss of local journalism “a crisis for our democracy and our society.” Today, two-­thirds of the nation’s counties have no daily paper. Since 2005, more than a quarter of all U.S. newspapers have closed. During that same period, papers shed 70 percent of their jobs, dropping from 365,000 to 107,000. And newsprint costs, the biggest expense after people, have risen 60 percent since late 2020.

Tim Franklin leads the Medill Local News Initiative, a 5-year-old effort to reinvent the relationship between news organizations and readers. The initiative helps over 100 newspapers explore digital innovation and business strategies for survival. But as papers focus on a digital horizon, print subscriptions at the nation’s biggest chain, Gannett, deliver 10 times more revenue than digital ones. To close at least part of the gap, Gannett wants to quadruple digital-only subscribers to 6 million by 2025.

That’s critical because advertising has tanked. The Pew Research Center estimated U.S. newspaper advertising peaked at nearly $50 billion in 2006 but by 2020 had plummeted below $10 billion—and for the first time, below circulation revenue.

Newspapers are now closing at a rate of two per week, which frightens Franklin. But just as alarming is the emergence of “pink slime” journalism—websites that masquerade as local news while vacuuming up user data and, often, peddling partisan agendas. Industry watchdog NewsGuard found that pink slime sites (named for a cheap and unappetizing ground beef filler) are nearly as numerous as legitimate digital dailies: 1,202 pinks, 1,230 dailies.

“That sends chills down your spine,” said Franklin, a former Poynter Institute president and former editor of dailies in Indianapolis, Orlando, and Baltimore. Partisan ideologues near either end of the political spectrum, as well as corporate propagandists, can be slime culprits. Franklin’s team at Medill mines reader interaction data to maximize newspaper reputations as trusted sources. He believes if they can win that battle, readers will flock to their inboxes for daily newsletters.

Franklin said the single most important engine in growing and maintaining digital readers “is building habit, building reader regularity.”

But veteran editors didn’t embrace the new digital mindset quickly enough—and many didn’t embrace it until it was too late.

Jason Foster is senior editor for major league baseball coverage at The Sporting News, the oldest sports publication in America. He remembers well newspaper editors’ resistance to the online revolution. When, for example, Islamic terrorists attacked the United States on 9/11, Foster contributed to a print afternoon “extra” at the Gaston Gazette, a North Carolina paper. But at the time Gazette editors would not break news online—not even the world-­changing kind.

Foster didn’t write his first online breaking story until 2003 at The Rock Hill (S.C.) Herald when the city hired the first black police chief in its 150-year history. But in those days, editors still resisted publishing online in order to shield scoops from competitors. By 2010, though, publishers had begun to understand online branding, and Foster found the digital floodgates opened wide during stints at dailies in Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., over the next five years.

Foster’s current home, The Sporting News, was in the online vanguard. When late Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen sold it to a unit of Advance Publications in 2006, the weekly ­tabloid tallied 700,000 paid print ­subscriptions. Today, its circulation is 36 million monthly users, with its U.K. owners managing operations from the Isle of Man.

Meanwhile, as media platforms consolidate, Foster sees the lines blurring between newspaper, television, and digital. Increasingly, he said, ­analytics will measure where viewers and readers spend their time, and news groups will give them what they want.

“They’ll all just be news outlets,” Foster said. “They’ll need people who are good on camera, and they’ll need people who are good writers.” And every outlet will need multiple revenue streams to make ends meet, he said.

REVENUE STREAMS have always been king. When M. Scott Morris worked alongside Linda Heath at The South Alabamian 30 years ago, he knew losing a regular grocery ad could mean someone losing a job. Morris wrote stories, printed photos, helped lay out the paper, collected coins from newspaper racks, and picked up freshly printed editions of the paper from a press in nearby Monroeville, author Harper Lee’s hometown.

During that time, Morris learned what matters most: readers. One night, he rode shotgun in an editor’s yellow 1974 Ford Maverick to the steamy Coffeeville High gym. They hung out with professional wrestlers who were bosom buddies in the locker room but played the role of mortal enemies in the ring. Fans shouted their lungs out.

“It was theater,” said Morris, now a copywriter in Tupelo, Miss. “It was the same thing as Shakespeare: lying, deceit, love, honor. It was all played out on that little stage and people got into it.” Indeed, they got into it live—and then wanted to relive it in the local paper.

Linda Heath works on an edition of The South Alabamian. Photo by Am Heath

Linda Heath, associate publisher of The South Alabamian, remembers those days, too. “Every house in the neighborhood had the little yellow Mobile Press box,” she said. “I would take the Parade and my husband would take the sports section and my kids would fight over the comics.” Parade, once inserted in 32 million Sunday newspaper copies, quit printing last November but continues online.

In 2002, The South Alabamian ­forayed into cyberspace, too. Today, it’s one of 250 newspapers that live online with the help of Our Hometown Inc. The company helps papers navigate digital subscriptions on WordPress-based websites. The sites are enhanced with automated audio articles and ­podcasts, streaming video, plug-ins, newsletters, and apps that busy editors can hand off to experts. “I’m trying to help [newspapers] get ahead of the internet,” CEO Matt Larson said.

Despite mounting challenges, print newspapers still beckon some like a siren song. Bill Helm, for example.

In 2000, Helm was chief photographer for community sections at the Los Angeles Times. But he and 169 others lost their jobs when the Tribune Company of Chicago acquired the newspaper. For the next 13 years, Helm worked a series of jobs he calls “soul-crushing”—in customer service, education, insurance, and corporate real estate photography. Then, on New Year’s Day 2013, he and his wife resolved “that we weren’t going to wake up in the same bed a year later with me working the same dead-end job.”

That year, Helm began a successful eight-year run as editor of weekly newspapers in Camp Verde, Ariz. In 2021, they moved to Bellingham, Wash., so Helm could edit a pair of weeklies 5 miles from the Canadian border in Lynden. Local advertisers have lent strong support, and because his company also offers commercial printing, he doesn’t sense the death of print just yet. He clings to the hope that will be true of other local news­papers as well.

Helm still thrills at the sight of front pages that sing when a press ­foreman hands him first-run copies. He likes things old-school, plays baseball in a vintage league that uses 19th-century rules.

“There’s always this pocket of ­people who do things the way they were commonly done in another time,” he said. Maybe print newspapers, too, will realize the virtues of earlier eras.