How’s this for a bomb from a newspaper publisher: “If you consider television news high-quality journalism, then you’ll get what you expect.” Ouch. Roger Plothow – the publisher of the Idaho Falls Post-Register lobbed that line out to Shea Andersen of the Boise Weekly, who writes about how shrinking newspaper budgets (and by extension shrinking newspaper staffs) are affecting news coverage in Idaho. Plothow laments that (of course) the only place to get good journalism is from the daily newspaper: “If you want in-depth coverage of the state and the government, and investigative journalism, the current business model won’t pay for it.”
Plothow’s paper doesn’t give out his news willy-nilly for free on the Internet, no – you either have to be a print subscriber or pay $6 per month for access. While that wouldn’t play in most parts of the world – Plothow thinks it works in a small market like Pocatello-Idaho Falls: “The smaller you are, the more unique you are to your potential reader,” Plothow said. “We can legitimately say, ‘We’re not going to put our stuff up for free. We know you can’t go anywhere else to get it.'” (For clarity, I do not compete with Plothow’s paper – it’s in a different market in my state.)