Coverage of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce pose threat to local journalism
This is the Our View, prepared by the Editorial Board and should be considered the institutional voice of The Record.
Isn’t it crazy that Taylor Swift put Travis Kelce on the map?
Whether you’ve asked or been the recipient of that question, there’s no denying that it’s been a sweet couple of months for the Swifties. Swift’s “Era’s Tour” grossed $2.2 billion in ticket sales alone. The Wall Street Journal’s article, “Women Owned This Summer. The Economy Proves It,” cites Swift’s tour, Beyoncé’s “Rennaissance Tour” (which generated an estimated $4.5 billion for the U.S. economy) and the Barbie movie ($1 billion—plus box office haul) as the tales of this summer.
Naturally, when something that seismic happens, there are often ripple effects. Take Gannett, the country’s largest local-news publisher with hundreds of newspapers, who is now hiring a Taylor Swift reporter and a Beyoncé reporter. Per a Wall Street Journal article last week, nearly 1,000 people have applied for the jobs, which pay between $21.63 and $50.87 hourly.
You could say that Gannett is trying to get Taylor Swift to put them on the map, or better yet, in your hands, in the form of a newspaper. (If you want to laugh at a good joke, read Johnny Oleksinski’s satirical piece in the New York Post titled “Taylor Swift Beat Reporter Reveals Impossibly Grueling Daily Schedule.”)
However, the jobs received strong backlash, and rightfully so. It’s a perilous time for local newspapers, particularly the ones that Gannett owns—the company laid off around 600 employees last year alone.
Of those 600 people, some were reporters at the St. Cloud Times, which has been owned by Gannett since 1977. For a long time, Gannett’s ownership resulted in little interruption to the Times news-delivering services—in 2014, the newsroom had 36 employees.
Flash forward to last year, however, and that number trickled from nine, to one, to zero. That’s right; Gannett cut or bought out every single staff member at a newspaper serving a metro area of 200,000 people.
Today, the “Staff Directory” section of the St. Cloud Times website lists one sports reporter, Reid Glenn. Its front page is a desolate mixture of local prep sports coverage (all by Glenn), opinion columns (which readers submit), already-circulated articles from other newspapers and more advertisements than could possibly be clicked on. Truly tragicomic, clicking the “About Us” button actually just redirects to the USA Today Network website, which Gannett owns—neglecting the history of a 94-year-old newspaper.
It’s the sad reality of a world in which seven-second videos and instant news rule the day, and one of Minnesota’s largest metropolitan areas is left without a primary news source. (Although, the emergence of St. Cloud Live, which launched in February and transitioned to a weekly print publication this week, has been good to see, albeit still young.)
The chief content officer at Gannett, Kristin Roberts, justified the Swift/Beyoncé move in the Wall Street Journal article: “This is how we save local journalism…This is what we need to do.” Her argument is that the jobs will generate additional revenue for Gannett and, in a sort-of trickle-down economics argument, that money will make its way into the local newsrooms.
Call us skeptical at best.
And yes, we get it: Taylor Swift is popular, and people want to know more about her every day. But we’d argue that many fans are already providing that information to people for free. If you don’t believe us, head to the platform formerly known as Twitter and follow @SwiftNYC, known as “Taylor Swift Updates.” (From the time that Taylor walked into MetLife Stadium to watch the Chiefs vs. Jets on Sunday evening until Monday morning, the account tweeted or retweeted 68 times.)
More seriously, Gannett’s business choices signal the already wide divide between the haves and have-nots in the news industry.
According to a University of North Carolina study, nearly 1,800 newspapers closed between 2004 and 2018, leaving 200 counties with no newspaper. Americans are left with a slew of national news coverage, but little to no information about what’s happening close to home. That matters, because local newspapers are a public good: informing the local public about local issues, covering stories that fall through the cracks at big newspapers, reporting on stories that big newspapers pick up and including perspectives from more voices. Most importantly, they help to create a well-informed public, an essential characteristic to a healthy democracy—particularly necessary at a local level, where municipal elections end up impacting the daily lives of all citizens.
In this newsroom of 19 editors and staff, and even more reporters and photographers, we are constantly working towards publishing articles and columns that better inform the students, faculty, staff at St. Ben’s and St. John’s, the local community and beyond. We wish we could say the same for Gannett, both in St. Cloud and with their hundreds of other local newspapers.
In the words of NewsGuild of New York, a union for media workers, “@Gannett, you’re the problem, it’s you.”