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'State of the Media: Newspapers
Bill Dawson

The newspaper chapter of "The State of the News Media 2004" contains both warning signs and hints of potential opportunities for those who care about the state of environmental reporting in particular.

The report's historical overview of newspaper industry trends will probably be generally familiar to most journalists. Still, it provides a useful, detailed and sobering context for a better understanding of the waxing and waning fortunes of the environment beat as a newsroom fixture and the other ways that environmental coverage occurs.

Some key findings:

• The percentage of Americans reading newspapers started declining in the 1940s, but population growth meant circulation kept rising until about 1970, which then stayed essentially stable until 1990. Since then, however, circulation has been declining.
• Now, the problem isn't just a shortage of new readers. "People who used to read every day now read less often. Some people who used to read a newspaper have stopped altogether," according to the report. This trend is evident in all age brackets, not just young people, whose relative shortage of newspaper devotion has long worried industry leaders.

Despite declining readership, however, the newspaper industry as a whole is "economically robust" and "enormously profitable," the report asserts. Its authors stress that a crucial question confronts industry leaders:

Should newspapers invest in growing circulation -- perhaps by boosting and diversifying content, as some companies have done successfully? Or should they accept the judgment of some analysts that newspapers are a "mature" industry, no longer capable of significant growth and, therefore, focus on maximizing profits by other means, such as cutting costs?

It's clearly a question with serious implications for the future of environmental coverage, which has still not achieved "beat" status at many newspapers and has occasionally sustained cutbacks at some locations where it enjoyed that standing.

In this connection, what the report's authors perceive as a general pattern of past practice by newspaper executives is not encouraging. Since 1990, they report, broad cuts in editorial staffing typically occurred during tough economic times, followed by only "modest" staff expansions when the economy headed upward again.

Partly as a result, newsroom staffing declined by 2,200 fulltime positions since 1990. These cuts often occurred through buyouts that claim experienced journalists, the authors write, and accompanying budget cuts typically take the largest toll in areas that include investigative and in-depth reporting.

"It all adds up to mission creep with a reduced work force," they note, "and possibly less time for artful storytelling and high-level reporting and analysis." Those are all qualities that most environmental reporters would undoubtedly say are especially valuable for covering their challenging field well.

Despite such worrisome signals, the report also identifies a number of features on the newspaper landscape that could be hopeful for environmental journalists, or at least command their continuing attention.

Based on a content analysis of Page One stories at 16 newspapers last year, the report authors note "a small but steady trend toward a broader definition of news" when comparing the 2003 findings to similar surveys in 1977, 1987, and 1997.

While the number of "government" stories generally declined on front pages during this period, other story categories that could include environmental and related topics such as "domestic affairs," "lifestyle" and "science" have increased.

Meanwhile, instead of being driven by individual "protagonists," such as political leaders and celebrities, front page stories in 2003 were generally more event-based, tending "to focus on several people talking about events and ideas" instead of "institutions or people."

The report also notes "current experiments" in a number of cities, in which mainstream dailies have begun producing free papers aimed at potential readers in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic. Whether it occurs in youth-oriented papers, in traditional all-ages dailies themselves, or in the Spanish-language spinoff papers that some dailies are launching, more newsroom investment obviously could mean boosts in environmental coverage and reporting on other topics historically seen by some editors as lower priorities.

The report authors cautiously cite academic findings suggesting that papers with larger staffs may do better economically as a result. "In the long run," they write, newspapers may pay heed, deciding that in order to thrive, they must "cover aspects of the community, offer a depth of information, and provide a level of synthesis other media do not." If that happens, environmental journalism may well benefit.