Youngstown paper's death is a bad sign for others, because no chain or family group was willing to buy it, writer says

Mahoning County, Ohio, and
Youngstown (Wikipedia map)

The scheduled Aug. 31 death of The Vindicator, which will make Youngstown, Ohio, the first "decent-sized American city with no daily newspaper," is "a very bad sign" for the business and the communities it serves, Joshua Benton writes for Nieman Lab.

Why? Because the family that owns the paper couldn't find anyone willing to buy it, Benton writes: "There are, broadly speaking, two groups that are going to determine the near-term futures of local newspapers: on one hand, family and small-scale chain owners, and on the other, the big national chains seeking to maximize scale and efficiencies on the cheap. And neither of those groups could see a way to keep a daily newspaper alive in Youngstown."

Benton notes, "The energy in the newspaper business for the past half-decade-plus has all been toward consolidation: roll all these individual papers and small chains into one giant GannettHouseDFMTribClatchyCorp and let corporate efficiency buy everybody a little more time. But in at least in this one case, the consolidators have decided that financially there’s nothing of value left to consolidate. The tricks they’ve been using — cut staff, outsource editing, outsource production, regionalize ad sales — apparently weren’t worth trying in Youngstown. And that’s scary as hell."

In a city of 65,000 and a metropolitan area of 540,000, The Vindicator has a circulation of 25,000, by any measure a weak household penetration, but it still has 24 reporters, adhering to the old industry standard of one per 1,000 circulation, Benton writes, so there was the opportunity for cutting staff. But Youngstown is not an attractive market; its population is less than half what it was in 1970, and "If you had to come up with the single American city that best evokes the phrase 'Rust Belt decline,' Youngstown would probably be your choice," Benton writes. "But I don’t think this is a Youngstown story. I fear we’ll look back on this someday as the beginning of an important (and negative) shift in local news in America."