Tribune's bankruptcy could be a harbinger

The Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs, has filed for bankruptcy. Although this is sign of the distress in the newspaper business, the Tribune situation relates more to its heavily leveraged purchase a few years ago. The company has a mountain of debt and had little choice but to file for bankruptcy.

The Tribune's debt is dragging down some great American newspapers. The LA Times, the Sun and the Tribune are legendary and once fabulously profitable properties. These papers are not suffering alone. The McClatchy company, which bought foundering Knight-Ridder (another once-great newspaper company), owns the Miami Herald, Raleigh News & Observer, Charlotte Observer and other great papers. It, too, has a huge debt incurred in the Knight-Ridder purchase and has had to restructure that debt and lay off hundreds of employees. Cox Newspapers, out of Atlanta, has all of its North Carolina papers up for sale, leaving the Greenville Daily Reflector, Rocky Mount Telegram and others in limbo. There apparently are no eager buyers for newspapers, and the credit crisis has made it much harder to put together multi-million-dollar deals.

Could the Tribune bankruptcy be a harbinger for the entire industry? While Detroit automakers go hat-in-hand to Washington for a bailout, the newspaper industry suffers from some of the same problems that plague Detroit. Americans are not buying the traditional newspaper tossed in the driveway. More and more Americans are getting their news off the Internet or television (which is also suffering from revenue declines). Advertising revenues are down. Classified ads have been decimated by Internet options such as eBay and Craigslist. Sunday classified sections that once went on for dozens and dozens of pages are pitiful now. And daily classified sections are so thin they are no longer their own section or are so filled with "house ads" (newspaper promotions) that they are laughable. And newspaper management has not responded well to the challenges it faces.

But Americans still want to read the news. They want information, and they want it from a reliable source. Independent newspapers still provide that news, although layoffs in the newsroom and the redefining of news in futile efforts to win back readers have taken a toll on serious journalism. Investigative reporting, in-depth analysis and solid governmental reporting are getting more and more rare.

Newspapers are rushing headlong into the Internet with more and more sophisticated Web pages with photo galleries and video the print paper can't provide. But they haven't figured out a way to make the Internet pay as well as print ads did for more than a century. Until Internet ad rates rise sharply (which seems unlikely) or advertisers recognize that print ads are still valuable and worth the expense, newspapers will struggle, reporters and editors will be laid off, and readers (voters, citizens, decision makers) will be less well-informed.

An uninformed electorate is a danger to democracy. In terms of societal worth, newspapers are more important than automakers.