If the Toledo Blade isn’t sold by the end of this year, the 190-year-old newspaper will stop publishing.
Block Communications, the paper’s owner, announced the decision to staff in an email earlier this month, according to the newspaper.
“Unfortunately, an extremely difficult decision has been made,” wrote Block Communications’ president and chief operating officer Jodi Miehls. “The Block Family’s continued investment to keep the Blade open is no longer an option. The financial losses the Blade has endured for years are simply not sustainable.”
If the organization can’t complete a sale, the Toledo Blade will publish its final edition on Dec. 31.
Tim Franklin has been tracking the decline of local news for years. He’s a professor and the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Northwestern University, and is the founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative.
He says the Blade’s closure is part of a broader landscape of local news loss in Ohio, which has lost 55% of its newspapers in the past two decades. That’s the 6th highest percentage of loss in the country.
Franklin joined the Ohio Newsroom to discuss the uncertain future of the Blade and the impact of newspaper closures statewide.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
On the extent of local news loss in Ohio
Franklin: Ohio is one of the harder hit states when it comes to loss of local news. Ohio has four news desert counties. These are places with no local news whatsoever — no newspaper, no digital site, no ethnic media. So it's a serious problem in Ohio and really around the country.
We lose more than two-and-a-half newspapers in America every single week. We are adding digital only local news sites around the country. But for every new site we add, we lose two newspapers. So what's coming around is not replacing what's being lost.
On the frequency of large newspaper closures
Franklin: It's fairly rare for metro newspapers to close. One of the largest closures was the Youngstown Vindicator, which closed five or six years ago.
Many of the closures have been in rural areas [or] suburban areas around the country, which is a more kind of under-reported part of the local news crisis. If the Toledo Blade closes, I think this would be the largest newspaper closure in the country.
Editor’s Note: Two weeks before The Vindicator shut down in Youngstown, it reached an agreement with the Tribune Chronicle in the neighboring city of Warren. The Tribune Chronicle acquired rights to The Vindicator’s name, subscriber list and domain name, and has published a rebranded version of the newspaper for the Mahoning Valley since September, 2019.
On why so many newspapers are going under
Franklin: A lot of it has to do with changing reader consumption habits. Audiences have splintered across all the many new platforms that the digital world has brought on. They're going to social media — TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and other places — for news.
And advertisers have followed those eyeballs to those other platforms. As a result of that, advertising, which had made up 75% to 80% of newspaper revenues for many, many years, has disappeared. And so if any industry loses 75% or 80% of its base of revenue, it's going to be problematic.
The other thing that's happened is that newspapers have shifted to more of a reader revenue model or a subscriber model. That's actually worked in a number of markets across the country, but the problem with that is we have a subscription fatigue issue now. People subscribe to Netflix and HBO and Hulu — pick your platform. And at some point people say enough, and they're just not going to subscribe to any more publications.
And then we're also seeing the impact of AI. In recent years, search from Google and other platforms has directed a lot of traffic to local news sites, and then local news organizations try to convert those readers into subscribers.
But what's happening because of AI is that traffic at digital news sites has plummeted. Many people are going straight to these AI chatbots to get local news and information, so that traffic just isn't going to local new sites. And so that's also causing a problem in terms of getting subscribers and getting programmatic ad revenue from advertisers from visits to the sites.
The consequences of local news loss
Franklin: Research shows that in communities that lose local news, civic participation declines. Turnout in local elections goes down because people don't know the candidates or the issues as well as they did before. The number of candidates seeking local office goes down.
There's also research that shows that government spending and government borrowing costs rise because the Wall Street bond rating agencies know that there's no watchdog in that community monitoring the spending of local governments. So this actually literally costs taxpayers money.
"Local newspapers, I think, are like a glue that binds a community together. It's where you see your neighbors, your local businesses, your local schools, your sports teams, and they create this sense of community that gets lost."Tim Franklin, Northwestern University
Also, there's something more ephemeral. Local newspapers, I think, are like a glue that binds a community together. It's where you see your neighbors, your local businesses, your local schools, your sports teams, and they create this sense of community that gets lost. It's hard to quantify, but I think that's also something significant.
And I think we have this tsunami of disinformation and misinformation in the country, and research shows that people trust local news. They may not trust national news. They may not trust cable companies, necessarily, but they do trust their local news outlets by and large.
So when there's a loss of local news, rumor mongering and disinformation fill the void, and that leads to other really serious problems in itself.
On the future of the Toledo Blade
Franklin: I would suspect that we will see some nonprofit owners potentially bidding for the Toledo Blade, so I've not lost hope in the prospect of a new owner coming in to acquire it.
Nonprofits can do several things. One is they have more access to philanthropic dollars than a for-profit entity might. They have the ability to raise money from foundations, from individual philanthropists, from small donors that maybe a commercial entity would not. Also, they don't have the same quarter-to-quarter profit pressures that a commercially owned newspaper would.
Nonprofit is not in itself going to save the Toledo Blade or any other news organization. At the end of the day, you still have to pay your employees and make just a little bit of money.
But I think we may well see some nonprofit players step forward for the Toledo Blade — possibly even the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which bought the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which Block Communications also owned until May of this year, I think that's a possibility. Signal Ohio, which is also supported by the American Journalism Project, also might be a potential buyer. So we will see what happens.
