Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern University/Medill and head of the Medill Local News Initiative. “Cutting employees and costs at the same time Gannett is trying to grow digital subscriptions and digital revenue is a challenging combination,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean, professor and John M. As newspaper subscriptions and ad revenues decrease, it’s more difficult to service the debt - and Gannett is trying to transition from a print to a digital model, which requires large investments. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Catch-22 situation. Pursuing that strategy while servicing such a large debt load is an especially challenging situation for Gannett. This is certainly the strategy of almost all newspaper companies of all sizes however, few of them carry a comparative amount of Gannett’s reported $1.3 billion in debt (as of fall 2022). Gannett’s strategy, which applies to all its newspaper properties, including the Lansing State Journal, is to accelerate a transition from printed and delivered newspapers to digital news platforms. Print circulation and advertising and digital advertising didn’t generate expected revenues and labor costs and operational expenses increased significantly, including a 31% increase in the cost of newsprint within a year. The company reported a total loss of $54 million during its fiscal second quarter of 2022 against $749 million in total revenues. Those difficulties have also been negatively consistent since then. It has experienced financial and operational difficulties since its acquisition by GateHouse Media in August 2019. The most obvious source of the Lansing State Journal and other newspapers’ circulation problem is they are owned by Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the United States. The circulation numbers tell the basic story, but the causes are varied and complicated. Many signs point to an increasing decline. I fear for the Lansing community and people’s ability to obtain important news. “We were a presence in the wider community, but that presence is disappearing. We reported important stories from the township suburbs,” said Mark Nixon, former editorial page editor at the Journal from 1993 to 2006. “Whatever the reason for the downsizing of the Lansing State Journal, it leaves me sad because I remember our robust coverage of Lansing City Hall as well as East Lansing City Hall. Two decades ago, the daily and Saturday papers circulated close to 80,000 copies and nearly 100,000 of the Sunday edition. Sunday circulation declined 16.1% from a year ago to a total of 14,675 (print 12,646 and digital replica 2,029). Subscribers can only read the replica edition on Saturdays after the LSJ eliminated its print edition last year. That’s an 18.2% decrease from September 2021. A spokesperson said those numbers have not yet been audited. As of September 2022, the average Monday–Saturday circulation was 8,994, including both print (6,631) and the digital replica edition (2,363), according to the Alliance for Audited Media, an independent nonprofit organization upon which many newspapers and other media have relied for decades for accurate reporting of circulation. The paper’s circulation started declining in 2005 and hasn’t stopped. The Lansing State Journal, however, is experiencing an unwelcomed type of consistency: continued loss of daily and Sunday circulation and likely advertising revenue. (D.Consistency is typically considered a positive attribute for individuals and companies to achieve their goals. We also rate them High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and a clean fact-check record. Overall, we rate the Lansing State Journal Least Biased based on factual news reporting with a slight left lean in editorial bias. In general, this is a low-biased, factual news source that leans just slightly left editorially. Op-Eds tend to slightly favor the left but provide a reasonable balance of non-extreme opinions. National and International news comes via the USA Today Network or the Associated Press.Įditorially, the LSJ mostly endorses Democratic candidates. In review, the Lansing State Journal reports local news via staff journalists with minimal bias, such as this: Nearly 13,000 without power in Greater Lansing area as more storms approach. The Lansing State Journal is owned by the Gannett Company, which controls the USA Today Network. Revenue is generated from advertising and subscription sales. Founded in 1855, The Lansing State Journal is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Lansing, Michigan.
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