The news editor of the Austin Chronicle highlighted the history of weekly alternative newspapers in America, and described the challenges they face in both an online era, and a time of economic hardship, when he spoke before an audience at St. Edward’s University Thursday.
Michael King has been at the Chronicle since 2000, and has witnessed the paper’s online evolution firsthand.
He said that nowadays, most people live online, and there is always a push to be fast and first.
But King said that is not his personal mentality.
“I’m old school, I’d rather get it right than get it fast,” King said. “And, I’m afraid I’m a dinosaur for that.”
The Chronicle’s website is updated frequently, and features blogs, breaking news, multimedia and a city guide among its content.
And while the Chronicle has been on the web in at least an infant form since the late 90’s, King said, still, “We’re making this up as we go along.”
The Chronicle has managed to stay afloat since 1981 by operating with a local focus.
King said they do not have the resources to cover all national and international news, so they do not pretend to.
“I tell my writers, “think globally, write locally,” and that’s what we do,” he said.
The Chronicle tends to focus on Austin-Travis county, and some of the outlying towns in central Texas, where it faces little competition in the weekly independent news market.
“The chronicle has the advantage, and the disadvantage, of being the only island in the big sea of Texas,” king said.
He prides himself on providing, “not simply the news, but the news with an edge.”
The explosion of online media is one of the factors that has contributed to the financial hardships of print newspapers, and King said nobody has quite figured out how to make money from online journalism.
Once reliant on classified advertisements to bring in a portion of the paper’s revenue stream, websites like Craigslist have made the area unprofitable.
King said that the Chronicle’s revenue has not decreased across the board, rather it is flat, while expenses keep going up.
“I haven’t had a freelance budget for nearly a year,” he said.
And King does not see this changing anytime in the near future.
“We ride like everybody on the Texas economy,” he said. “Texas went into the recession a little later. We’re probably going to come out of it a little later.”
King said this predicament reminds him of the state of journalism in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when he was editor of “The Spectator,” an underground student newspaper at Indian University.
The alternative, mostly culture-driven publication seemed to make a splash in the community, but was not financially sustainable.
“For the first ten years, they couldn’t make ends meet,” he said.
The paper had trouble with payroll, and the staff was forced to switch printers on a few occasions because the companies did not approve of the publication’s content.
“If you’re going to build institutions, that means your going to have to make money of out of it,” King said.
And the Chronicle, as well as other traditional new outlets, are now struggling to continue doing just that.
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