What’s a newspaper worth?

Posted on 1 October 2020

Without our local paper, there are literally tens of thousands of dollars we wouldn’t have known were being spent

Late last Friday the city put out a news release that mayor and council had reached a “mutual agreement” with the city manager to part ways after five years.

What the news release didn’t say was that the move had come following multiple changes at city hall which included:

• An increase in the number of closed-door meetings not open to public scrutiny;
• An (attempted secret) investment of city money in building a downtown hotel;
• Pay increases for senior management that included overtime pay of up to $235.72 an hour that amounted to over $100,000 in overtime for just nine people in a single summer;
• A series of building cost overruns amounting to more than $13.4M in just three years.

You know who did report these piece of information left out of the news release?

The local paper.

Sure, lots of other media outlets reported it as well, including yours truly. But it was the Prince George Citizen that truly led in scrutinizing costs, putting time and money into investigative reporting and filing freedom of information requests, a time-consuming process that involves going through various levels of bureaucracy to get access to documents that government bodies won’t willingly give you.

In a Twitter thread following the city’s release, editor Neil Godbout shared just a few of those articles from past years that allowed the public to know more about how their tax dollars were being spent, and the decision-making process behind them. Regardless of how you feel about that decision-making process or whether the money was being spent well, it’s undeniable that this is information we wouldn’t have had without the once-daily paper.

And I say once-daily with some trepidation because late last year the paper transitioned from a daily to a weekly. Sure, they still publish online every day but no one will tell you this was a decision made because of how robust their business is. There are fewer stories, fewer bylines and fewer opportunities for them to dig into the sort of stuff I documented above.

And what’s the cost? Well, in a massive study of cities that had, then lost, their daily newspapers the indication is that it could be thousands of dollars precisely because no one is watching city hall. As Kriston Capps reports for CityLab:

Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects.

It is no exaggeration to say that without the Citizen filing freedom of information requests, the public would have no idea that more than $100,000 went to overtime pay. As it stands, it wound up being an election issue and is the subject of an upcoming review. No paper, and that $100,000 annually could well be a rolling part of our annual budget.

Even diminished, the Citizen is still doing work no one else is. It’s the only outlet regularly providing court coverage, school board reporting and heading out to regional district board meetings. Not all of these wind up being blockbuster stories, but they provide a way for the rest of us to know what’s going on at our public institutions — or, at the very least, know someone else is doing so. We’re lucky enough to have other media organizations with good reporters, but none of them have the institutional knowledge and background of a paper whose history goes back more than 100 years.

I recently bemoaned the fact that without the daily paper, my parents no longer had a day to get a quick scan of the local news. Godbout quickly pointed out that they do in fact have a daily email that replicates the layout of a front page, showcasing the top stories of the day. It’s free, but you also have the option of chipping in a few bucks of month to help support the paper’s continued existence.

Personally, I think it’s a good deal.

Filed under: journalism, Prince George