Harold W. “Hal” Fuson retired recently after 44 years as a newspaperman.

Like many
retirees, he has a few things to get off his chest, so he agreed to be interviewed by a
journalist he trusts, himself. The interview was conducted in his home office in
Encinitas where he found himself with his feet up on his desk drinking his second coffee
of the day.

Q. You don’t play golf. Why in the world would you want to be retired?

A. People don’t take you seriously when you tell them you are unemployed, so mostly
it’s just a matter of semantics. Let me make clear that I am not looking for another job.
If people find out you’re both unemployed and looking for a job, they’ll never take you
seriously.

Q. You seem to want people to take you seriously. Why?

A. I’m always interested in new experiences. Being taken seriously would certainly
qualify.

Q. As I understand it, you took over management of a business with decades of

unbroken success at cash flow rates of better than 20 pct. and in two years reduced the
revenue by about 40 pct. and the cash flow to almost nothing. Then you sold it for a tiny
fraction of what it was worth just five years ago. Why would anyone take you seriously?

A. Probably they shouldn’t.

Q. Tell us a little about your career.

A. When I retired on June 30, I was the executive vice president and chief operating
officer of a company called The Copley Press, Inc., which for over a century had been in
the newspaper business in California and the Midwest. Prior to that job, I was the
company’s general counsel for almost 25 years. Before that I was with the Los Angeles
Times. Early in my career I spent over a decade as a journalism teacher. Just to show
you that I wasn’t one of those media executives who didn’t understand the Internet,
here’s a hotlink to a more detailed resume on my LinkedIn site: http://is.gd/4TuuW.

Q. Does the company still exist? What happened to its newspapers?

A. The company still exists and I remain on its board. My last contribution, if you can
call it that, was to negotiate the sale of its flagship newspaper, the San Diego Union-
Tribune. The sale closed in May. The company still owns real estate and other assets
unrelated to newspapers and continues to operate with a small headquarters staff.

Q. Newspapers are dead, dead, dead. Right?

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A. I don’t think so, but if I was able to answer that question unequivocally, I could also
have foreseen the collapse in their revenues that began in 2007.

Q. Yes, but lots of smart people knew that newspapers were dying years ago, right?

A. Those are the same people who predicted 38 out of the last two recessions. You
give enough monkeys enough typewriters, you get Shakespeare, or, at least, John
Grisham.

Q. Okay, so maybe not a lot of people foresaw just how quickly the Internet was going
to destroy you. But it did, right?

A. The Internet is not their friend, but it didn’t destroy newspapers. Partly because
newspapers aren’t destroyed and partly because a number of factors conspired to crash
the market for advertising, especially print advertising.

Q. But everything I read in the newspapers says they are dead, dead, dead. Can’t you
believe what you read in the newspaper.

A. Generally what you read in newspapers is true enough, certainly more true than
what you hear on MSNBC or Fox News. There is, however, a certain inherent bias in all
media that smart readers have to adjust for. Here, let me give you a brief lecture:

The nature of journalistic narrative drives much of our thinking about the state of
newspapers. Newspapers employ far more journalists than any other medium and
these journalists are endlessly fascinated not only by their own navels, but also by
their own stomachs and the revenue stream that feeds them. Journalists think
quite a bit about where their bread is coming from and what they think about they
often write about. Other media aren’t blessed by a plethora of journalistic
stomachs of their own, so their content is driven largely by the news judgments of
media that do have journalists, namely newspapers. In addition to the special
hazards of journalists writing about themselves, all journalism is, after all,
journalism -- it focuses on what’s new, sometimes to the detriment of larger truths.
The combination of navel-gazing and the requirements of the journalistic form
reinforces certain myths and inevitably leads to over-simplification.

Q. Hmm. That’s a mouthful. So, you’re suggesting that readers have to apply a little,
uh, Kentucky windage to whatever they read?

A. Yeh, you could put it that way. Bottom line is that journalists, like all of us, are
especially untrustworthy when talking about themselves. Here are some examples of
myths that newspapers help propagate about themselves: The Myth of Money-Losing

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 Newspapers; The Myth of Shuttered Newspapers; The Myth of Paper and Ink as a Dead
Medium and the Myth of a Newspaper Golden Age.

Q. Those sound like topics for more lectures.

A. Yes, so let’s start with the first one:

1. The Myth of Money-Losing Newspapers

Stories abound of newspapers in bankruptcy or facing sale or closure because

newspapers don’t make money any more. There has been a huge hit to newspaper
profits in the last two years, but the great majority probably remain profitable on a cash
operating basis. It’s hard to be sure, because newspaper companies, even the public
ones, don’t often publish income statements for individual newspapers. Those
newspapers that have reported losses may be including substantial non-cash losses,
e.g. amortization of purchase price and other capital expenditures. And even those
newspapers that are draining cash today probably could be operated on a cash positive
basis if their owners were willing to make the necessary and painful changes required to
reduce costs, often in the face of powerful union opposition. But the operating costs
aren’t the cause of those bankruptcies you’ve read about. It is the cost of acquisition
debt that has sunk Tribune Company and the owners of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and is threatening to capsize McClatchy. In each case,
the owners simply incurred far more debt to acquire their newspapers than the
operations can now support. The newspapers published by these companies are likely
still profitable, if only barely so, on a cash operating basis.

Q. Are you suggesting that the owners were fools to pay those prices, like the $600
million that was paid for the Star-Tribune?

A. No more foolish than the millions of Americans who were paying too much for
houses during the same period. The newspapers, by the way, just like the houses, are
almost all still standing, which leads me to the next lecture:

2. The Myth of Shuttered Newspapers.

A powerful theme of much of the journalistic narrative is that newspapers are closing in
major cities. In fact, only three major cities have lost newspapers in the last few years
and in each case there is a surviving metro newspaper serving those communities. The
closed newspapers are in Seattle, Denver and Tucson, each of which was part of a joint
operating agreement that had kept alive “failing newspapers” under the terms of the
Newspaper Preservation Act, a 1970 law that exempted certain operations from
federalantitrust laws. At last count, according to Wikipedia, there were seven surviving
joint operating agreements -- 21 have ceased to operate. Actually, the Wikipedia article,
when I looked at it, hadn’t caught up with Tucson yet, so the accurate numbers are 6
and 22. One of the survivors is in Detroit, which earlier this year stopped home delivery

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 of print newspapers on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. By definition, a joint
operating agreement is a device for saving an editorial voice that would otherwise be
stilled by the effects of economic competition -- they don’t work very well as business
propositions and the numerous critics who opposed the act at its inception may well
have been right. The important point is that what happens to newspapers in JOA’s tells
us almost nothing about the overall state of the industry.

Q. You seem to be suggesting that newspapers are going to be fine and that all the
“Sturm und Drang” of the last few years has been pointless.

A. John Sturm is the president of the Newspaper Association of American. Sturm’s a

good fellow, even if he does sound like a radio voice of the 1950s. I don’t believe I’ve
met Drang. But to answer your point, not at all. Newspapers are never going to be the
same again and that’s not, repeat not, a good thing. I’ll get to that in a minute. First,
let’s prick another myth.

3. The Myth of Paper and Ink as a Dead Medium.

Too bad Bill Gates didn’t invent paper and ink: he’d be much richer. The notion that
paper and ink as an engine of communication is as dead as the buggy whip has yet to
be proven, even though it was first posited with the advent of radio in the 1920s.
Sturm’s predecessor at the newspaper association was all over that one trying to stifle
radio before Rush Limbaugh was born. Unfortunately, he failed. Prophets have been
foretelling the imminent disappearance of paper and ink for many decades now, but still
it persists, the Kindle notwithstanding. Newspapers remain the only medium capable of
landing on your doorstep in a complete, neatly wrapped paper and ink package every
morning within a few hours after the presses start. The medium itself is conducive to
presentation of information in a coherent, consistent, orderly way that doesn’t scatter
attention the way the web does. If newspapers can deliver value to advertisers, and
there is every reason to believe that’s true, especially as this recession ebbs, there is no
reason to think paper and ink will die.

Q. Good, because otherwise I’m not sure what I’d wrap my fish with. Although I do feel
guilty about all those old-growth trees and spotted owls you killed in your career.

A. That’s another subject, but let me at least interject that very few old-growth trees end
up as fish wrap. Our newsprint comes mostly from wood by-products and tree farms, as
well as recycled paper, and is one of the easiest commodities to recycle. If you do your
part to keep old newspapers out of the solid waste stream and into the recycling bin, you
don’t need to feel guilty about using a superior medium.

Q. Any more myths?

A. Yes, and this is an especially big one for people like me who first got ink in their
veins in the 1960s.

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 4. The Myth of a Newspaper Golden Age.

Newspapers may have experienced something of a golden age, from, say, 1968 - 2005,
but it was much shorter than most people think and occurred for structural reasons
related to a much longer-term decline in newspapers’ position in the information
marketplace. Throughout most of American history, most newspapers were partisan
rags. That was true of the Los Angeles Times until Otis Chandler became its publisher
in 1960. Others were commercial notice sheets much needed by shippers and traders,
but priced outside the reach of ordinary citizens. The shift to the Golden Age blessing
of objective, independent down-the-middle reporting in which I was fortunate to spend
my career, occurred primarily for economic reasons, not moral ones. When you’re the
only newspaper in town and your success depends on delivering eyeballs to advertisers
the last thing you want to do is alienate half of your potential readership.

Q. You mean Woodward and Bernstein were just helping line up advertisers to fatten
the Graham family’s bottom line?

A. Not at all. They are true American heroes, even if Bernstein is a bit boorish and
Woodward’s subsequent prose is a bit windy. They did wonderful work. There have
been scores of others like them and there still are. Also, some very brave owners, like
the Grahams, who have taken a lot of heat at the country club and elsewhere that less
stalwart entrepreneurs would not have.

Q. It’s too bad nobody’s reading their work any more, at least not in the newspaper.

A. Hate to do this, but that’s another lecture. People still do read paper and ink
newspapers.

← 5. The Real Story of Newspaper Readership.

Newspapers have been shrinking as a proportion of the larger information market since
at least the introduction of radio. First, competing dailies, which existed in even the
smallest markets, began to succumb to mergers with stronger competitors, then,
especially after WWII and the advent of television, afternoon dailies gradually
disappeared. By the 1970s, few markets supported more than one daily newspaper.
The “penetration” of newspapers, the number sold divided by the population, has been
declining for 100 years and in recent years each paid circulation reporting period is
greeted by further exclamations of dread about the future of the medium. The
exclaimers don’t take into account the extent to which newspapers, as an advertiser-
driven medium, are adjusting their circulation patterns to reflect the needs of
advertisers. Newspapers seldom make back the cost of manufacturing and distribution
on the circulation revenue from the sale of each newspaper. As their profits have been
squeezed, newspapers have reduced their circulation territories, sometimes massively,
and sharply reduced promotion costs, including everything from advertising and

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 contests to price discounting. Those reductions have been especially harsh in the
advertising collapse of the last two years.

Q. You give all these lectures, but you don’t say much about the Internet, which is why
newspapers are dead, dead, dead. Remember? And, as a result, isn’t democracy
going to Hell?

A. Democracy has always been a messy business. We only stick with it because we
haven’t found any better way to organize peaceful societies. Maybe I’ll eventually get
round to talking about why the Internet is a problem. First, though, here’s why, as a
citizen, I applaud it.

6. The Failure to Acknowledge the Power of Offsets.

Everyone acknowledges the importance to democracy of readily available reliable

information about public issues. Newspapers have long been viewed as the primary
source of such information, even if most citizens have for decades named television as
their main source for news (as one of my reporter friends told me, that’s like saying you
get your food from your refrigerator not the grocery store or the farm). Whatever
television’s shortcomings as a tool of democracy, there’s no denying the power of new
digital tools for spreading and analyzing information. Much of the hand-wringing about
the demise of newspapers fails to take into account the alternative vehicles that are
filling the vacuum. There is more than enough information available mostly for free
through a simple Internet connection to enable anyone to participate at a very high level
in civic affairs. Admittedly, much of this information is created by newspapers and
others whose business models are no longer generating levels of revenue sufficient to
guarantee the free flow of information will continue. Much of it, however, comes from
sources that didn’t even exist a few years ago. Some of the web sites devoted to the
Supreme Court are a good example. Anyone can have at his or her fingertips almost
every document available to the justices as they consider their cases. Many of these
vehicles are unproven or fall short in obvious ways of replacing the best reporters, but it
is awfully hard to argue that the information available to those who want it today is less
than it was in the past.

Q. You really do sound like a man who doesn’t care whether newspapers live or die.

A. Since I don’t believe they are actually going to die, I don’t waste a lot of emotion on
the subject of their deaths. I am concerned about their lives, however, and here’s why:
Newspapers may not die, but as a class they have undergone a radical shrinkage in
resources available for aggressive news coverage and community leadership. Real
damage has been done and seems unlikely to abate. Newspapers and their owners
have gone from naming hospitals and leading civic reforms, to a future in which most of
them may be little more than Earl Scheib franchises. A perfectly good place to get your
clunker cheaply repainted, perhaps, but hardly a community institution of substance. No

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 one that I know of has ever named a hospital or an arts center after Earl Scheib,
although according to Google to get to the Youngstown Children’s museum you pass a
Scheib paint shop and turn past a hospital. It is fair to ask whether an Earl Scheib
newspaper can be expected to routinely achieve results like putting your local
Congressman in jail. My colleagues at the San Diego Union-Tribune did exactly that a
couple of years ago. In order to stay afloat financially, I was forced subsequently to
preside over the dismantlement of our Washington bureau, whose members did most of
the legwork on the story. The new owners have only accelerated similar cuts. An
industry made up of Earl Scheib newspapers will be hard put to continue to act as an
advocate for the rights of citizens to be informed participants in a democracy.

Q. You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of Mr. Scheib.

A. I’m sure he’s a fine fellow, if he exists. But I suspect his business never threw off the
kinds of profits that local newspapers did in the hay day of the last half century. He can’t
afford luxuries like a squad of private detectives to run down the culprits that caused the
damage he is painting over. He doesn’t have enough money left over from running a
business in a hotly competitive market to endow hospitals. On the other hand, he
probably never engaged in any of the shameless boosterism or local political and social
shenanigans than some publishers have been prone to over the years.

Q. Are you implying that providing the news is a luxury newspapers can’t afford?

A. No. Newspapers without news aren’t going to do very well, but unfortunately, readers
don’t necessarily discriminate between 25 cent news and two dollar news; the $1.75
delta contains a lot of luxury that newspapers have been busily throwing out. Some of
them may have even slashed below the 25 cent barrier and maybe they will kill
themselves. I don’t know.

Q. So, newspaper readers are stupid, eh?

A. No stupider than the people who go to chiropractors when they have cancer. In fact,
significantly above average for the population as a whole. But we’re all guilty of taking
things on faith derived from past glory, and only belatedly getting around to figuring out
present dysfunction.

Q. What is to be done?

A. The main thing that we as citizens need to do is to keep our eye on the ball, to
reckon with a picture of the world that is as close to reality as possible. We can’t afford
to be distracted by nostalgia for ways of doing things that never existed quite the way we
remember them and certainly don’t exist that way today. We can’t make informed
decisions about the future based on warped or outdated versions of the past or the

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 present. Best thing you can do is read a newspaper or two every morning; trust what
you read, but cut the cards.

Q. That’s it?

A. No. There’re a couple of other things that come out of my years as a lawyer for
news organizations. I don’t think government financial support for journalism is a good
idea, but there are some government actions that might ease somewhat the pressure
on newspapers. Here are a few that the industry has advocated.

• Removal of legislative restrictions on consolidation across media-- the only thing

dumber than a newspaper buying a television station is the federal rule that bars it
from happening. Eliminate the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rules.
Yesterday.
• Antitrust exemptions to permit joint pricing of internet content. This may be a little
too close to the DNA of the Newspaper Preservation Act, but given the monopoly
power of Google in the market for search advertising, it’s worth trying.
• More favorable tax policy -- that California continues its sales tax on newspapers
while eliminating it on snack foods boggles the mind, but I can’t see it changing.
Like it or not, we use tax policy to advance all manner of social policy. Why not
use it to encourage newspaper readership?

I think ultimately these are half measures, worthy enough in their own right, but not the
sort of thing likely to bring back the newspaper golden age in anything remotely like its
former glory.

Q. Now, you’re done?

A. Just this. One last lecture:

Through the work of newspaper publishers and organizations they have supported, like
the Newspaper Association of America, the California Newspaper Publishers
Association and other state press associations, the Media Law Resource Center and
the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the First Amendment has received
massive support over the last fifty years. That support is inevitably going to decline.
Just a few examples of what was achieved, conveniently compiled by Lucy Dalglish of
the Reporters Committee:

• New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964, public officials who have been defamed
have to prove the mistake was made intentionally or recklessly.

• The federal Freedom of Information Act, first introduced back in the 1950s, after
it was heavily pushed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It took
ASNE more than 10 years and lots of money to get that law. There is not a

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 single state open meeting or records law anywhere in the country that was not
shepherded through the statehouse by the media — usually local newspapers.

• Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart in 1976. It stands for the proposition that
if you learn something in an open courtroom, a judge can’t gag you from
reporting it.

• Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia in 1980. It says the public has a First

Amendment right to attend criminal trials except in the most extreme
circumstances.

• The two Press Enterprise v. Riverside cases in California in the mid-1980s.

They stand for the proposition that the public can’t be kicked out of pre-trial
hearings or jury selection.

• New York Times v. United States, the Pentagon Papers case. The New York
Times and The Washington Post led the effort in 1970 to make clear that,
except under the most extreme circumstances, government may not censor
information via a prior restraint on speech or the press.

Today, the resources available to mainstream news organizations for advocacy in the
courts and legislatures are already a fraction of those available even two years ago.
Fewer actions will be brought for access under state open meetings and records laws
and the federal Freedom of Information Act. Fewer lawyers will bother judges with
motions for access to proceedings or records, because the news media will no longer
have the resources to pay for them. The pressure on public lawyers to take seriously
routine requests for access has already significantly abated. Most of these lawyers, by
the way, were much more receptive to public access than their government official
clients. Without the potential of lawsuits backed by fee awards, the incentive for public
agencies to err in favor of secrecy has greatly expanded.

Citizens, lawyers, judges, legislators, all of whom have been heard to grumble about
nosy journalists impeding their grand schemes and precious privacy, are facing a
choice. Either they must recognize the importance of public oversight and public
access and do their part to protect it or face the consequences of their self-imposed
darkness.

Q. Wooo! Nothing like leaving with a leap onto the soapbox.

A. Actually, I made that all sound a little more dire than I think it really is, because I’m
hopeful that the Internet and other tools ultimately provide their own sanitizing
techniques that will ultimately trump the forces of darkness. See lecture #6 above. But
you can never be sure about technology.