Have You Noticed How ‘Newspaper’ Seems To Be A Dirty Word These Days – Even The American Society Of Newspaper Editors Wants To Get The Word ‘Paper’ Out of Its Name

Philip M. Stone December 18, 2008

Everyone seems to be breaking their heads these days trying to figure out how to resurrect the newspaper industry, so it seems a bit shameful that organizations with the word “paper” in their title are shying away from such an affiliation.

Back in May the International Newspaper Marketing Association (INMA) changed its name to the International NewsMedia Marketing Association INMA). Pretty clever that, the group still gets to keep the INMA initials but is Newsmedia really just one word?

And now the American Society of Newspaper Editors wants to follow suit. It, too, will keep the same initials so the brand remains intact, but the name changes to the American Society of News Editors if members accept their board’s unanimous recommendation.

Little by little as print newspapers seem to chip away at themselves, so do those peripheral organizations around them. INMA explained its change last May by Earl Wilkinson, INMA executive director, saying, “Our roots and origins remain intact. Most of our members continue to make the preponderance of their revenues from print newspapers, and we believe that will resume growing in the future. Yet the online, mobile, digital and niche publishing canvasses are vital, growing and important to news consumers and advertisers who want to reach them.”

The ASNE explanation, as given by President Charlotte Hall in an e-mail to members said that the board recognizes, “The business of journalism, no surprise to you, has changed and that ASNE also needs to change to better serve our members, our industry and our craft. We are all way beyond ink on paper, and so the word “paper” would disappear from our name to reflect better what we do today and where we are going. Our new name, pending your approval, would be American Society of News Editors. This change maintains our valued brand, ASNE, and our logo, ASNE Leading America’s Newsrooms.

“To assure a robust future, we also need to broaden our base of members. Thus, our proposal includes offering full membership to editors of news Web sites, including those without a print product, as well as leaders in journalism education and journalism foundations. More and more, news organizations are not defined by “daily.” Thus, this requirement would be removed from membership requirements.”

Well, so much for  a group founded in 1922 as an organization for editors of the nation’s daily newspapers. It makes one wonder how long it will take before Editor & Publisher, the US newspaper trade journal, changes its tagline from “America’s oldest journal covering the newspaper industry” to “America’s oldest journal covering the news industry”.

For die-hard dinosaur print newspaper fans like this writer it feels like those trade organizations have little faith in print any more and are jumping from a sinking ship. Back in May we asked Timothy Balding, the president of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN)  whether the group was contemplating renaming itself The World Association of News Media and thankfully he said there were no such plans.

“We continue to accompany  – in many ways, I hope, lead – newspapers in their transition towards multi-platform publishing, so no one has any doubt about our identity and objectives. And we continue to grow in membership, staff, activities and influence, so our current name is not hampering our ambitions and our expansion,” Balding explained.

At least Merriam-Webster continues to define newspaper as “a paper that is printed and distributed usually daily or weekly and that contains news, articles of opinion, features, and advertising”. How long before that changes to: “information distributed …”?

Even newspapers are predicting their own  end, witness this lead paragraph of a commentary By James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times describing the announcement by the Detroit newspapers to cut home delivery from seven days a week to three: “This might go down as the week that they took paper out of the newspaper business.”

One newspaper sector that can’t be happy with all this talk and the actions of taking “paper” out of “newspaper” is the newsprint industry. “The North American newsprint market continues to contract and our customers have told us they anticipate further decline,” says David J. Paterson, president and CEO of AbitibiBowater, North America’s largest newsprint supplier. To counter less use and to try and keep prices high – up more than 30% this year --  his company, the largest newsprint producer in North America, says over the next few months it will remove another 830,000 tons of newsprint from the market.  

But it may be a losing battle. A $20 dollar a tonne increase for this month has reportedly been dropped, and White Birch, number two in the market, is said to have done a deal with Gannett to supply newsprint throughout 2009 at a price well below today’s $770 average price per tonne.  And whereas AbitibiBowater is said to be stronger on the US East Coast and therefore is more able there to hold to its pricing, on the US West coast prices are said to be about 10% less, at $700 per tonne.

Newsprint providers are fighting a major consumption drop – it’s down 20% this year in North America and there is nothing to indicate that trend won’t continue into 2009. Few days go by now without a newspaper somewhere announcing a  size reduction, usually blaming the $20 monthly newsprint increases this year. As newspapers savagely cut back on paper consumption, the newsprint operators may well find they’ll have to withdraw more and more product from the market to have any hope of maintaining current pricing, but already the smaller suppliers have seen  the writing on the wall and are discounting.

Newsprint producers were and are caught between a rock and a hard place – they were losing serious money on their newsprint operations and they needed to raise prices just at the very time when print newspaper revenues were tanking. A truly classic example of business rotten timing -- a producer increasing prices when its customers are hemorrhaging red ink.

Everyone is going to be watching how it goes in Detroit with the home delivery cutback to three days a week and the newsstand editions reduced to probably just one section. If that is seen to work, then the newsprint business will see even harder times ahead and indeed paper could be an even rarer news raw material.