Commentary
Newsday
It is difficult to know where to start. Newsday, “the new kid on the block,” came from nowhere to challenge the long-established players in the market. That new kid not only challenged but eventually surpassed them, becoming the highest-selling newspaper in the country. Established in 1993, it took 20 years to reach the top spot.
Now, 32 years later, it has come to an end.
A perfect storm of challenges has led to where we are now: closure.
Newsday is no different in most respects from the other players in the market; this is an industry under severe pressure. But one crucial difference is that, as a stand-alone entity that is not part of a media conglomerate, there is nowhere for Newsday to hide the year-on-year losses that all the local daily newspapers are suffering.
Whilst the scourge of covid is certainly a factor – as the country shut down more than once, and with it, advertising sales fell off dramatically – that was by no means the only nail in the coffin.
The elements of this perfect storm are as varied as they are damaging, with no single factor exclusively to blame. This is also not a “this just suddenly happened” scenario, but, rather a symphony of events playing out over a decade.
Nor is it a challenge unique to TT. Globally, traditional print media have been under pressure for some time. Thousands of newspapers have closed worldwide. In the United States alone, more than 3,500 are estimated to have closed in the last 20 years.
Some challenges have been causes of our demise; others have hastened it. We have faced issues that are institutional in nature; every day, the people of TT would have faced comparable challenges.
Having gone through a lengthy legal battle and been successful all the way to the Privy Council, the company is out of pocket in excess of $3 million. Whilst costs have been awarded in our favour at every level, the company cannot collect those costs until an assessment has been done by the courts. The wheels of justice turn too slowly and life goes on. And winning in the courts can sometimes be a pyrrhic victory if you have to wait years to get costs and litigants are allowed to abuse and manipulate the process to the detriment of the other side without recourse, while the company and all employees suffer.
The industrial-relations climate has always been particularly challenging, from trying to get all interested parties on the same page to rulings that sometimes appeared to discount the financial reality of many companies to the detriment of the organisation and all employees. It would be remiss, however, not to mention that the courts seem to have changed their approach in more recent times. The cost, however, is in the millions and is a challenge for a small company.
On that topic: the cost of raw materials, and in particular paper, the largest expense, has also skyrocketed in the last decade. The costs of machinery and of maintaining it have also increased significantly, as manufacturers of the main components have gone out of business owing to the industry’s contraction.
The world has also changed, and TT is no different. The value placed on traditional media has diminished, and the political campaign to discredit them for nefarious reasons has ramped up.
When Newsday’s price increased by $1 – from $2 to $3 – a few years ago, 40 per cent of the readership said, “No, thank you.” That $3 was less than the price of a doubles – but was still too high a price to pay.
A newspaper entails hundreds of people working every day of the year, and working around the clock, to keep the public informed – but $3 is too much to ask for that service.
Advertising revenue has also decreased significantly over the last decade. Advertising in all media is a fraction of what it was then, but for print media, that drop has been most severe. Print advertising has fallen by 75 per cent.
In the context of the significant increase in costs, this is the most impactful element of the perfect storm that has been brewing over the last decade.
As we become another statistic in the casualties on the print media landscape, we remain proud of our legacy of unwavering independence in keeping the public informed. We are grateful to those who supported Newsday throughout, to longtime readers and those who discovered and came to appreciate the paper’s strengths more recently. We are grateful, too, to the dedicated staff of every department who worked every day and night for over two decades, determined that the paper must come out, in the interest of that readership.
We encourage the people of TT to continue to support our media colleagues and journalists in general. The media are one of the most important elements in any democracy, and it is a telling sign of a democracy itself under threat when the media are under threat.
