‘It’s not as bad as I thought’: An examination of how the pandemic impacted news organizations in eight Midwestern states

It could have been worse. Much worse.

In fact, the executive director of the Missouri Press Association expected the COVID-19 pandemic to gut a local newspaper industry already reeling from more than a decade of competition from free digital content, rising newsprint costs and circulation declines.

Seven of the state’s 200 or so newspapers ceased publishing in 2020, while about 10 underwent mergers with neighboring publications.

“I feared worse,” said Mark Maassen, executive director of the Missouri Press Association. “I’m bullish. I feared for the worst, and it’s not as bad as I thought.”

The COVID-19 pandemic hurt community newspapers across the country in much the same way that it impacted other small businesses. After all, many are just that, small single-owner operations that rely on their communities for revenue.

Hundreds of newspapers in the Midwest have undergone changes in the past year, although many of them were in the works before the pandemic. Some media outlets closed altogether, others consolidated with sister newspapers and some went to digital-only formats. Newsrooms continued to shrink to offset massive advertising revenue losses.

As governors issued stay-at-home orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. many newspapers’ owners in the Chicago area told Gateway Journalism Review that they lost as much as 90% of their revenue in that first month. 

“Meijer didn’t want to do inserts anymore, because they didn’t know whether whatever they were advertising would be in stock,” Lisa McGraw, public affairs manager for the Michigan Press Association, said during a late-January interview. “This is still an ongoing problem.”

Teri Hayt, a regional manager with Report for America, which helps place reporters in newsrooms where they cover underserved communities and beats, said continuously cutting staff is not sustainable.

“What’s the idea with all this cutting?” she said. “Have you seen an organization that has cut, cut, cut and come out stronger? You can’t cut your way to success. You cannot do more with less. You do less with less. It’s simple logic.”

She said the newspapers that are enjoying the most success are the ones that are being creative and asking for support from the readership and community foundations.

“Our reluctance to ask for money years and years ago, I bought into it all those years,” Hayt said. “But things are changing and continuing to change. It’s a paradigm that, when you finally get out there and work with your community foundations, they’re thrilled to hear from you. When they invest in the local newspaper, they’re now investing in their community.”

She continues to see great work being done, even in newsrooms where executives have tried to stick to the conventional business model, and simply cut staff to offset losses.

“I think a lot of these organizations are doing great work in spite of the decisions being made,” Hayt said. “With RFA, I’ve seen newsrooms that are trying to make a difference and do things differently. And those reporters and those editors are still swinging for the fences every day.”

Gateway talked to industry professionals and press associations in eight Midwestern states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. This story originally appeared in our spring 2021 issue. We will publish the dispatches from each of these states in the coming weeks on our website.

“COVID hit newspapers like it did every other business in Illinois,” said Sam Fisher, president and chief executive of the Illinois Press Association. “Most changes in 2020, whether closings or mergers, were already being considered before the virus hit.”

In Illinois, newspapers relied heavily on the association and each other to navigate the pandemic, he said.

“Many of over 400 members are small weeklies that are one- or two-person operations,” Fisher said. “We’ve seen that when COVID hit a small operation and made it seemingly impossible to continue to publish that others stepped up to make sure that there wasn’t an issue missed.”

Maassen said the pandemic presented an opportunity, particularly for weekly papers and mid-sized companies.

This package of stories will provide a rundown the fallout of the pandemic via numbers from each state and observations by publishers and newspaper associations’ leaders. It will also highlight some of the innovations those smaller players have used to not just stay afloat but, in some cases, thrive.

“In my opinion, some of the metro papers, like the KC Star and Post-Dispatch might be the ones that are most in peril, because of their reliance on large national advertisers,” Maassen said. “If you’re a smaller newspaper, if you’re not one of the giants, there’s an opportunity to adapt your business model and do well.”

According to a Poynter Institute analysis, since 2004, more than 1,800 newspapers have closed across the country, about 1,700 of them weeklies. When the findings were originally published May 20, 2020, it stated that the pandemic helped cause the closure of more than 60 newspapers. That was two months to the day after Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced his stay-at-home order.

In Illinois, according to “The Expanding News Desert”, a website run by the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, two counties near the lower tip of Illinois – Hamilton and Pulaski – have no operating newspapers.

The map, however, was last updated in 2019. The Cairo Citizen, a weekly in Alexander County, closed March 26, leaving the county without a publication.

Half of the 10 counties that border those three have just one print publication.

Even before 2020 laid waste to newspapers throughout the state, one-third of papers in the state disappeared between 2004 and 2019, according to the website.

In northern Illinois with 22nd Century Media’s folding, suburban Chicago communities lost 14 relied-upon weeklies. At least 15 other newspapers around the state shut down. At least eight papers were sold, including four Gannett properties that were sold to Paxton Media Group.

Downstate, more than a half-dozen pubs merged with others to stay afloat.

Just before the pandemic hit, Shaw Media shut down two of the weeklies it acquired in recent years: the Minooka Herald Life, and Valley Life. Over the past few years, Shaw’s suburban publications have gone from broadsheet to a tabloid format. In 2020, its papers in Sterling, Dixon, Ottawa and LaSalle followed suit. Each of its dailies eliminated a day of publication, and the Sauk Valley Media staff moved from its sprawling office in Sterling to an office in Dixon that just a few years ago would have only comfortably fit SVM’s editorial staff. The Daily Chronicle building in DeKalb was sold, one of countless newspaper offices closed throughout the state.

At least four newspapers shut down their printing operations. Several outlets went digital-only.

Apart from the Shaw publications, about 10 papers eliminated at least one edition, at least three going all the way down to once a week.

Two of the state’s largest media groups, the Sun-Times and Daily Herald, actually launched new publications amid the storm. The Chicago Sun-Times launched the website initiative La Voz Chicago in May, and the Daily Herald Media Group launched three weekly newspapers: the Glenview Herald and the Northbrook Herald on June 18, and the Shelbyville Eagle on July 2. Executives from both groups did not respond to requests for comment.

Even before the pandemic hit, newspapers have spent the past several years cutting executives and their salaries that dwarf those of younger talent committed enough to the craft to accept a significantly smaller salary.

In May 2019, Angela Muhs resigned from the then-GateHouse-owned State Journal-Register in Springfield. As she was escorted out of the building, her editorial colleagues left with her “as a show of respect and support,” staff writer Dean Olsen told The Associated Press.

Dennis Anderson, who was named GateHouse’s state editor in June 2019, resigned as executive editor of the Peoria Journal Star in May 2020. After starting and briefly running his media consulting firm DennisEdit Strategists LLC over the summer of 2020, he became Shaw Media’s vice president of news and content development in September.

In September, Lee Enterprises eliminated two executive positions at The Southern Illinoisan. Tom English and Terra Kerkemeyer were let go as executive editor and publisher, respectively.

Alee Quick was promoted from news editor into the top editor role, but on March 9 she left the paper for a new job at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Lauren Cross, Midwest projects reporter for Lee Enterprises, assumed the top editor role, in an interim capacity.

English spent 18 years working at The Southern. He was hired in his early 20s as a telemarketer and climbed through the ranks. In late January, English became executive producer for the Breakfast Show at KFVS-12 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

What’s unfolding in Illinois is hardly uncommon, of course. At least 30 Wisconsin papers have made significant changes since the pandemic hit, including 16 being either sold or merged with other papers.

In 2020 alone, nearly 10% of paid-subscription newspapers in Indiana shuttered their doors.

The year 2020 “will never be seen as a good year for the newspaper industry, when you look at the outright closings and the number of papers that were forced to make the decision to reduce their frequency,” said Steve Key, executive director and general counsel of the Hoosier State Press Association.

Since 2004, Indiana residents have lost more than one-third of their newspapers, down from 220 to its current roster of 142.

Katrice Hardy, executive editor of the Indianapolis Star, has a unique perspective on the state, but as regional editor for USA Today in the Midwest, she also has tabs on the bigger picture.

“The biggest thing we’ve tried to do in Gannett is focus on the content that matters the most,” Hardy said. “We don’t want you doing a hundred stories, we want you doing the stories that matter most.”

She said Gannett is hiring all the time. Hayt, the regional manager for Report for America, is skeptical.

“The pandemic is wiping out what was left of our business model,” she said, “and while it might have been a good model once, it’s not a good model anymore.”

She has the credentials to make such an assertion. She’s been in the publishing industry for 35 years, and her management gigs have run the gamut, from Sports Illustrated to powerhouse daily newspapers such as The Orlando Sentinel. She was formerly executive editor for GateHouse Media Ohio and managing editor at the Arizona Daily Star, and helped the American Society of News Editors merge with the Associated Press Media Editors in 2019 to form the News Leaders Association, for which she was interim executive director.

“We’ve lost a tremendous number of editors, a number of journalists, period, who have so much knowledge and understanding,” Hayt said. “You don’t replace a Mark Baldwin, or people on your copy desk, people who have worked for years, and how many mistakes have they caught. We’ve cut ourselves into this situation.”

At least in Baldwin’s case, when he retired at the end of 2020 as executive editor of the Rockford Register Star and the Freeport Journal-Standard, it was under his own volition.

Two Pew Research reports published in October 2020 shed light on the widespread damage to news outlets.

One found that about 40,000 employees received Paycheck Protection Program loans, and most of the loans given to nearly 2,800 newspapers were for less than $150,000. That figure is roughly two-thirds the number of U.S. newspapers that existed in 2016. 

Those papers employed about 180,000 employees, the Pew researchers found. 

Poynter estimates that in an average recent year, about 100 newsrooms closed.

Maassen said one of chief roles for newspaper associations early in the pandemic was to gather and provide information on those loans.

“There was a lot of just sharing of information we got from our national partners,” he said. “That was the most immediate impact our members saw: ‘Wow, I can apply for something like this, and based on the rules we were seeing it might not have to be paid back?’ ”

About 5.2 PPP loans were given to small businesses in 2020, according to the Pew report.

The other Pew report found that at the time of publication, newspaper advertising was down 42 percent. But to illustrate the importance of reliable local news, despite the financial woes of Average Joe, circulation was down just 8%.

Clearly, the reliance on local news is still robust. To cling to the traditional methods of delivering it would be madness, according to Ron Wallace, publisher of the Quincy Herald-Whig and vice president of newspapers for Quincy Media, which also owns the Hannibal Courier-Post. 

“I’m an old guy, and it’s time for the old guys to get the crap out of their heads,” Wallace said. “The newspapers killed themselves. Our arrogance, we did ourselves in. We created the self-fulfilling prophecy, and it never should have been said that newspapers are dying.”

In broadcasting news, Fox News Channel’s revenue went up 42% in 2020, while CNN and MSNBC’s dipped 14 and 27%, respectively, according to Pew’s reporting, which also states nationwide network TV ad revenue went up 11%.

Wallace said the idea that TV news is not only killing it but also insulated is a fallacy.

“The broadcast division is only a few years behind,” Wallace said. “They are under the same attack now that we were under 14 years ago, whether it be from OTTV (over-the-top television) or streaming services. I believe the broadcasting division is starting to realize, and COIVD has brought that into the spotlight, that they don’t own the market on advertising revenue.”

He has insider information. For many years, Quincy Media owned more than two dozen broadcasting outlets, including those in the Herald-Whig’s market. Thanks to the built-in opportunity to collaborate, Wallace said in November that the company had virtually the same number of employees in their newsrooms as they did pre-pandemic.

It will be interesting to monitor how that situation trends going forward. In February, all of Quincy Media’s properties other than the Quincy Herald-Whig and Hannibal Courier-Post were sold for nearly $1 billion to Gray Television.

The key to survival for newspapers, Wallace said, is a paradigm shift, away from the way the game has always been played. He said collaboration and creativity will be paramount for newsrooms to stay open, if not recover.

If the Illinois Press Association’s virtual annual conference in September was any indicator, newspapers have the capacity to tear down the proverbial wall between editorial and advertising departments – or at least install a swinging door.

The Chicago Independent Media Alliance banded together 43 of its then-62 member outlets for a spring 2020 fundraiser that brought in more than $160,000.

“It’s honestly way more than we could have expected,” said Yong Lee, marketing manager for the Korea Times which, like the Chicago Reader, has been in business since 1971.

Yazmin Dominguez, The Reader’s media partnerships coordinator in six short months, is also the project coordinator of CIMA. She said collaborations such as CIMA have been tried before in the city, so she’s optimistic that the landscape has shifted toward a mindset of cooperation over competition.

During a session at the virtual conference in September, Anna DeShawn, founder of the queer radio station E3, said, “there’s enough room for everybody, and the fundraiser shows that.”

“I’ve got no competitors,” she continued. “It’s my own personal ethos. I just see opportunities to collaborate and grow each other’s reaches.”

Christopher Heimerman is a former editor of the Daily Chronicle in DeKalb, Illinois, and freelance journalist covering media practices in the Midwest. He wrote the memoir “40,000 Steps” which details his war with alcoholism and the marathon he ran after rehab. He lives in DeKalb. Follow him on Twitter @RunTopherRun.