Driving home last Sunday from a beautiful weekend in northern Michigan, I stopped for gas off the highway in Auburn, a small town between Midland and Bay City.
“Hey,” came a voice from behind. “You work for MLive?”
I get that occasionally since my license plate reads MLIVE. Low points for creativity, but I promote the brand with pride as I drive between our eight offices around the state. I turned and saw a teenage boy gassing his pickup and answered in the affirmative.
“I read MLive all the time,” he said. “I love your coverage of high school football. I play at (Bay City) Western High School.”
I thanked him and praised the work done by our sportswriters. As I resumed fueling, he offered one more thing:
“I’m a subscriber.”
I turned with a big smile on my face, walked over and shook his hand. “Thank you for supporting our journalism,” I said.
I took a lot of satisfaction in that interaction. First, I lived in Auburn for the 18 years that I worked at The Bay City Times and have a lot of affection for the area and its people. Second, that teen represents why we do what we do – both the journalism and charging for it.
Our industry has been in upheaval for two decades now, as technology wiped out print newspapers’ hold over local media, and print subscribers and profits plummeted. There’s no path back to that era, and the road forward remains challenging.
In August, Gannett – the nation’s largest newspaper chain – laid off 400 journalists in 70 newsrooms across the country and liquidated another 400 open positions. They are competitors, but I take no satisfaction from this development – this is bad for our industry and bad for our country.
Nearly 30 percent of journalism jobs in America have evaporated since 2008. Since 2019, 360 newspapers have closed in the United States, leaving “news deserts” in communities.
This is almost solely because the economics of internet-based news cannot support the infrastructure needed for local media to have the resources we did in the newspaper era. Especially when access to news is often free.
That’s why MLive for two years now has been marking some of its content “Subscriber Exclusive” and walling it off so only paying readers have access. I don’t hear a lot of complaints, but when I do I offer no apologies. News is essential, it takes dedicated professionals to report and present, and those people need to be paid for providing this essential service.
Subscriptions pay for day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts reporting like government news, crime coverage and feature stories about people in your community. It also pays for in-depth reporting like our investigation of sexual assaults and deaths at the Faster Horses music festival; an extensive trip by a team of journalists to the Upper Peninsula to report on challenges to ecology; Emmy-winning documentaries on major issues facing Michigan residents; and podcasts, like this gripping Michigan Crime Stories series on unidentified bodies, focusing on the case of one missing 13-year-old.
No one ever handed out free newspapers – people paid for home delivery or at the newsstand. The core of the business model remains this: We make relevant content, and customers reward us by purchasing it.
How can you support journalism and ensure we can continue to provide it in our eight newspaper communities and on a statewide basis?
Subscribe. You can choose a digital subscription (click here to see current offers) or a print subscription (click here).
Activate: If you already are a print subscriber, you get full digital access to all Subscriber Exclusives. You won’t miss any of our great work, including stories that don’t make it into the paper. To register, simply go to this link and click on “activate.”
Read and engage: Whether or not you are a subscriber, you support us with every article you read, every video you watch, every podcast you listen to, every MLive link on social media you click on, and every one of our newsletters you subscribe to.
In short, we’re seeking more connections like the one MLive has with the teenager I met at the gas pump in my old hometown. He was satisfied, I was happy, and the system is working for both of us.
🎧 Have you listened to our Behind the Headlines podcast yet? Each week, Vice President John Hiner and producer Eric Hultgren take you behind the frontlines of journalism, often with a special guest. Listen here on Spotify or here on Apple.
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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.
