It doesn't matter who the new owner of the Portland Press Herald is, or whether there even is one. The state's largest-circulation daily newspaper simply cannot survive in its current form. This situation is not helped by the fact that PPH execs both here and in the state of Washington seem incapable of imagining themselves out of this mess.A glance at the most recent figures pairing circulation declines with those in advertising revenue show that while papers like the PPH have a problem keeping and attracting readers, the bigger problem is keeping and attracting advertisers. The problem has worsened significantly over the past several months, with the economy's downward spiral.
The Press Herald has lost 16 percent of its subscribers in the past eight years, according to reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the independent organization that monitors media-readership statistics.
That decrease is on par with the other two big dailies in Maine: the Bangor Daily News lost 15 percent of its subscribers in the same period, and the Lewiston Sun Journal lost 19 percent of its subscribers in the eight-year period from 1996 to 2004, when the paper stopped ABC audits.
And it's better than stats for the Boston Globe and the Hartford Courant, which have respectively lost 24 percent and 20 percent of their readers between 2000 and 2008. (The other major daily in the region, the Providence Journal, saw its circulation drop 15 percent over that period.)
It's not good that one-seventh of Press Herald readers stopped reading in the past eight years, but it's much worse that the paper's advertising revenue dropped by half, according to statements from the company. (The other papers are quieter on their revenue situations, but massive reductions in newspaper-ad spending are extensively documented nationwide, with many papers seeing double-digit ad drops in just one year.)
That is, in fact, the problem that threatens the paper today, and will continue to hang over the heads of any new owners. Ads and circulation are, of course, intertwined: reduced revenue means cost-cutting, which means making the paper worse for readers. Common cost-cutting measures, used at papers nationwide, as well as at the Press Herald, include shrinking the size of physical pages, printing fewer pages, and lowering the percent of space in the paper that is used to print news. In turn, this requires a smaller staff to report, assemble, edit, and lay out a paper.
That saves money, but readers drop away — particularly if, as the Press Herald did, the paper raises its cover price at the same time it cuts content.
This circling-the-drain problem gives us a good starting point for troubleshooting the Press Herald's future.
Cutting costs
The Blethen family borrowed roughly $230 million in 1999 to buy the paper, and has struggled to meet its quarterly debt-service payments ever since. Over the past decade, they've certainly lowered the amount they owe — to perhaps as low as $100 million — that's still a crushing burden for the paper to bear. Certainly, staff costs are a significant contributor, too, but a paper needs people to run. Debt service is an unnecessary killer.
