1900 Technology Parkway The Production Facility The Press Building
Amid an ever-changing market and industry, news organizations such as the PA Media Group, the parent company for PennLive, are doing some of their best work, analysts say. Pictured here: The Patriot-News rolls off the press at its Mechanicsburg-based production facility. PennLive, the web-based news outlet of the Patriot-News parent company, continues to expand in readership and regional footprint.
(Daniel Zampogna)
Newspapers no longer land on the front step every day. Some print only a few times a week, as increasingly, readers get news from smartphones and tablets.
Inside newsrooms, specialty "desks" such as business, features and graphics, have in places been consolidated with other departments, if not slashed.
The pace of daily journalism - once a daily marathon race to the evening deadline hour - has radically changed. These days the deadline hour is "now" - the internet and smartphones driving reader demand for immediate news and information.
Across the region - as in much of the country - the face of the modern newspaper continues to evolve at a dizzying pace as daily newspapers once the fixture of communities take on new incarnations to keep up with technology and consumer demands.
The latest news this week is out of Carlisle, where the community's local newspaper, The Sentinel, a fixture in the Carlisle area since 1861, announced it will cease to publish a Sunday edition. Beginning Oct, 3, the 10,000-circulation paper will publish a combined weekend edition on Saturday.
Sentinel management say the move is driven by changing reader habits.
"For many years the community relied on a newspaper to get information," said Kim Kamowski, marketing director for The Sentinel. "Nowadays, there are so many avenues and channels. There's print, online, social media, TV, and radio. They don't rely as heavily on print as they did in the past. We understand that and our employees feel the same way."
Like other newspapers across the region, The Sentinel is contending with the ever-changing face of print journalism.
"The journalism business continues to go through a long period of shakeup," said Ford Risley, Interim Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Graduate Education in the journalism department at Penn State University. "It's unfortunate but newspapers are facing this new reality that readers are getting their information at a variety of places and advertisers also are looking at different places for advertising. I don't think that what is going on here is different from what is going on across the country."
Arguably one of the most dramatic changes to a newspaper in the region was seen at The Patriot-News. In 2013, Advance Publications, the parent company of PennLive and The Patriot-News, announced it would stop printing a daily newspaper in central Pennsylvania.
Advance, which has been making major changes to nearly all of its 31 news properties, took the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper from a daily down to three times a week while launching a concerted focus to become web dominant.
"This industry is changing by the minute," said Cate Barron, vice president of content for PA Media Group, the parent company of PennLive. "It's hard to predict where we will be down the road a year from now let alone much further out. We really have to adapt to changes in trends in the industry, and all trends point to digital."
Top PennLive editor Cate Barron says that since the switch to three days a week and the push on digital, the news organization has seen growth in audience and coverage area.
PennLive, the online presence of The Patriot-News, continues to exceed expectations, she said.
"Since we went to three days a week and put all the newsroom focus on digital, we've seen immense growth in our audience as well as our coverage area," Barron said.
PennLive's recent coverage of the Little League World Series, which saw local team Red Land advance to the title game, saturated the digital market with a reach far beyond the region, state and country.
The same applies to the outlet's coverage of Penn State football and news: PennLive's readerships is now worldwide, as anyone with ties to the university is able to find news on the school and team online no matter where they live.
A similar story is playing out in York, which for decades has been home to a thriving competitive market between two dailies, The York Daily Record and The York Dispatch.
The York Daily Record continues to print seven days a week, but the focus, says publisher Sara Glines, is no longer the print product.
"We continue a push for digital and to present more and more unique content and tell stories in ways that are uniquely curated to work in digital and mobile," said Glines, president of York Newspaper Co., which operates combined business operations with The York Dispatch in a joint operating agreement.
Glines is confident that it's only a matter of time before her newspaper converts to an exclusively digital product.
"I don't know what the timeline is," she said. "We don't have plans to look at a lesser print publication, but someday the print readership will be more niche. We can see the trend. More and more readers see us only on a digital platform. If you follow that trend, someday there just won't be the same need for print."
The York Daily Record and The York Dispatch were recently acquired by Gannett Co., the McLean, Va.-based publisher of USA TODAY.
Included in that sale is The Evening Sun of Hanover, which this year began to print just three days a week.
Beyond Gannett's stated goal to acquire more newspapers in favorable locations, Glines said the news behemoth is pleased with the YDR's push toward digital.
"We will just keep pushing through on the digital front," she said. "They are very happy with the course we are on."
To be sure, newspapers have had to address the concerns of readers disappointed with the fact that they no longer have a daily newspaper to pore over with their morning coffee. But perhaps even more troubling to newspapers has been the challenges in the face of declining ad revenue.
The dire predictions that widely circulated across newsrooms a few years ago, however, seem to have lost steam.
A few weeks ago, journalism analyst Rick Edmonds, in his column for The Poynter Institute, noted a recent industry report showing growth in digital audiences as well as the "bottom-line contribution" of print circulation. The data-heavy Newspaper of Association of America report, Edmonds noted, shows the median "bottom-line contribution" of circulation had risen from 42.6 percent in 2011 to 56.1 percent last year.
If anything, says The Sentinel's Kamowski, it's an indication that while readers demand immediacy in their news, they are not ready to part with the paper product.
"We hear it from quite a few readers," she said. "They want something in their hand to hold, especially for The Sentinel. I don't see it in my lifetime doing away with the print product. We will have the print product as long as we can imagine."
For a veteran journalist such as Barron, who came up in newspapers when they had a myriad "desks," beats, writers and columnists of every stripe, the new digital incarnation does nothing to compromise the craft.
"We still really believe in the tenets of good journalism," she said. "We have had to conscientiously carve out time to do really important long-term work on projects."
Barron noted the recent multi-story package from staff writer Daniel Simmons-Ritchie, From Patient to Prisoner, looking at how the state's residents with mental illnesses are treated and the overworked and underfunded system in place to serve them.
"We have to make sure we create time," Barron said. "It's easy to get immersed in the 24-7 demands of the digital product where there are no deadlines. We have to focus on doing important, investigative, watchdog work. We still really feel we are here to tell a good story and cover the community. That will never change."
Teri Henning, president the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, said that while Pennsylvania newspapers lack homogeneity, many news media companies continue to invest significantly in digital and other new revenue streams.
"In our experience, Pennsylvania's reporters cover their communities well, and technological advances often make the investigation and gathering of some information easier than it has been in the past," Henning said. "If anything, the calls to our legal hotline have increased in recent years, suggesting that there is a significant amount of investigative and access-to-government-related journalism being practiced in Pennsylvania."
News media companies, like all businesses, she said, must continue to evolve.
"My overwhelming experience with Pennsylvania's newspapers, many of which are family-owned, is that they are committed to informing and engaging their communities, and that they focus their time and resources on ensuring that continues," Henning said.
Penn State's Risley said he thinks the end of print journalism is inevitable. But whether that is five, 10 or 20 years is hard to say, he said. Newspapers continue to move in the right direction, he said, while continuing to do their job: original reporting.
"Newspapers are doing some of their best work," Risley said. "Great reporting, great storytelling, great investigative work. The quality and depth are still there, it's just that you don't see it as often as some people would like."