Getting rid of columns makes no journalistic sense

Whenever you see the phrase “Gannett announced,” you always hold your breath.

Because what follows those two words is always … let’s say, interesting?

On Thursday, the company announced plans to reduce the size of its opinion sections, reducing the number of editorials and columns in a a belief that those parts of the newspaper, in the words of The Washington Post, are “alienating readers and becoming obsolete.”

From The Post:

“Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” the editors, who come from Gannett newsrooms across the country, declared in an internal presentation. “They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues. They perceive us as having a biased agenda.” Not only are editorials and opinion columns “among our least read content,” the committee said, but they are “frequently cited” by readers as a reason for canceling their subscriptions.

Matthew Pressman, a journalism professor at Seton Hall, and a short but good Twitter thread on this:

So, there is a good discussion to be had about the role of newspaper columnists in the digital age, that digital and social media have eliminated the gatekeeping function that newspaper columnists played, that the democratization of voices and opinions have rendered the need for a columnist obsolete. At the very best, it has changed the role of a columnist, and the best in the business (the Mike Vaccaros and Mike Sielskis of the world) have adapted to this new world.

But this isn’t that discussion.

Look at Gannett’s reasons

Columns and editorials alienate readers. They cause them to cancel subscriptions.

This is an economic decision. This is about money. This is doing away with a historical function of newspapers and daily journalism because Gannett is afraid to make people mad and have them cancel their subscriptions.

That’s why this feels so gross to me.

There were similar rumblings around Buffalo a few years back, when Jerry Sullivan and Bucky Gleason were let go as columnists by The Buffalo News, that management did not want to make sports fans mad by running columns that were critical of the home team, and have them not subscribe to the digital edition.

Truth be told, this is one of the interesting and potentially dangerous side effects of the subscription model. Think of it in terms of incentives. If people are paying for your product, and you are either making a majority of your revenue through those subscriptions, the incentive is going to be to provide the type of coverage that people want to pay for. And that means not providing the type of coverage that people DON’T want.

It makes business sense, looking at it from an economic point of view.

But getting rid of columns and opinion pieces role simply because you don’t want to upset your readers seems antithetical to the purpose of journalism and a the point of a newspaper.