Last week hadn't been a good for Chicago media - in print or online
Last Friday, we learned that Chicago lost yet another media outlet - and would soon lose one more.
Over at Chicago Reader, media columnist Michael Miner reported that Gapers Block, Chicago's oldest surviving online media outlets will shut down at the end of the year. Basically, co-founder and current publisher Andrew Huff said that the site won't be taken down - it would still be up as an archive - but unless someone takes it off his hands, it won't published anything new after January 1, 2016.
Gapers Block has been around since 2003 - which is decades in Internet years. The site, quite famously, didn't pay its contributors, but people contributed to it because was willing to publish some great stuff in more obscure areas. It has done an admirable job covering city politics, social issues, art and culture (I've always especially liked its literary coverage). It also covered restaurants, bars and small businesses. It covered sports, but I'd be lying if I said I ever paid any attention to that part of the site.
Still... For many Chicago journalists, it became a venue to release stuff that nobody else would publish - or, for those who wound up having non-journalist day jobs, a place to do some stuff they would rather be doing for money. Many journalists and writers that went on to bigger, money-paying things got some stuff to put on their resume thanks to Gapers Block. And, after 12 years in existence, the site became a respected part of Chicago media landscape. Being published on it had value - just not the monetary one.
In his letter to the readers, Huff was pretty candid about why he decided to stop publishing. Gapers Block has always been a labor of love, and because he didn't have money to pay people, he wound up writing and editing the majority of what went up. Which was fine for the first few years, but after a while, he felt burned out. He kept going because he didn't want Gapers Block to just end. But now, he is in the process of taking over his father's company, which eats up his free time. Last summer, Huff hired Mike Ewing to do the bulk of writing and editing. That worked well for all involved... Until Huff ran out of money to pay Ewing, who took another, better-paying job.
Huff wrote that he found that he liked all the free time he had not writing/editing for Gapers Block, and he just didn't have it in him to go back to the old schedule. He wrote that, if someone would want to take over the site, he would certainly consider passing it on. But Huff argued that he wasn't holding his breath - the site design was in need of a major update, and there is the whole web hosting costs thing. Gapers Block never brought in that much revenue, and whoever takes it over would need to figure out a way to cover those costs.
I've devoted plenty of digital ink to all of the Chicago newspapers and magazines that shut down (or barely made it past first issue), but the Internet is littered with corpses of Chicago digital media outlets that couldn't survive - Chicago News Cooperative, the Brown Line Media websites... Even DNAinfo Chicago, which produces some of the best reporting in the city, has been struggling to become profitable. Many neighborhood news outlets - the Uptown Update, Crime in Wrigleyville & Boystown, Sixth Ward, Sloopin - are labors of love and/or outrage, and survive purely because their owners believe in them.
It hasn't been a good week for the print media, either. The day the Gapers Block announcement went up, Extra newspaper announced that December 18 issue would be its last.
Extra has been published on Chicago's Northwest Side since 1980. As publisher Mila Tellez wrote in her farewell letter, the paper was launched because the English-language community newspapers that served the area were growing out of touch with its increasingly Spanish-speaking population. This was the time when Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square, East Village, Humboldt Park and Avondale were either largely Puerto Rican/Mexican or had significant Hispanic populations. So Extra became bilingual, with everything from editor's note to articles to event calendar published in both English and Spanish. By the time I started reading it back in 2006, the paper didn't just cover the Northwest Side - it covered all of the city's Spanish-speaking communities and generally dealt with city-wide and national issues that were relevant to that population.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that Extra's managing editor for the past year is a friend of mine. Back when I was blacklisted by Tribune, he was one of the first people I reached out to. He offered me a gig, but nothing ever really came of it).
According to Tellez' farewell letter, the factors that affect all newspapers - the shift of advertising to digital, the fact that fewer people pick up physical copies of any newspaper - affected Extra. But, by the looks of things, it wasn't the only thing that did it in.
Another area that has been affected has been the small entrepreneur. With the increase in property taxes in the city of Chicago, storefronts are once again becoming empty and there is a large decrease in small business. Case in point is the Little Village area on 26th Street as well as the Humboldt Park area. Our own building at 3906 W North Ave. had their taxes increased by 100 percent in the last two years. This is not sustainable for a community newspaper or any other small business.
Now, I've seen what their building looks like. My first thought was 'this can't possibly cost that much in property taxes. But community newspapers have always operated on fairly thin margins. Many of the businesses that advertised in Extra when it launched simply aren't there anymore. With sources of revenue shrinking, I can see how the increase of property taxes on their building would become a straw that broke the camel's back.
Extra's newspaper officesThat said, I do feel there's one factor Tellez wasn't mentioning. Since Extra launched, the area it served has changed again. Wicker Park and Bucktown were pretty gentrified and way less Hispanic by the early 2000s, and I've seen Logan Square gentify before my eyes over the past 10 years. The future of Humboldt Park isn't settled, but its eastern sections have definitely seen gentrification.
Extra never really tried to appeal to the new residents.
I have a feeling that, even if the Internet didn't disrupt all newspapers' advertising-based revenue model, Extra would find itself in the same position as its former competitors found themselves in 35 years ago - grappling for relevance in a rapidly changing community.
(But I would be remiss not to note that the one newspaper that has tried to appeal to the changing population - Logan Square based Nothing Less newspaper - only lasted a few issues. The West Town edition of the Chicago Journal, which launched a few years earlier, only lasted a few years. The other efforts have been websites that occasionally released annual print magazines. Chicago Pipeline website, which covered Bucktown and Wicker Park, essentially folded when its owner was hired by DNAinfo Chicago. Our Urban Times is still around, and so is Logan Squarist. From what I understand, like Gapers Block, they don't pay its writers.)
If it was just Extra announcing its closure, this post would be yet another in a long series of posts marking the decline of print media. But the fact that both Extra and online-only Gapers Block announced their closure on the same day highlights something important. Simply going digital is not a cure-all. Whether you are in print or online, you need money to survive. And generating revenue in media landscape that seems to change faster and faster every year is not going to get any less challenging.
Over at Chicago Reader, media columnist Michael Miner reported that Gapers Block, Chicago's oldest surviving online media outlets will shut down at the end of the year. Basically, co-founder and current publisher Andrew Huff said that the site won't be taken down - it would still be up as an archive - but unless someone takes it off his hands, it won't published anything new after January 1, 2016.
Gapers Block has been around since 2003 - which is decades in Internet years. The site, quite famously, didn't pay its contributors, but people contributed to it because was willing to publish some great stuff in more obscure areas. It has done an admirable job covering city politics, social issues, art and culture (I've always especially liked its literary coverage). It also covered restaurants, bars and small businesses. It covered sports, but I'd be lying if I said I ever paid any attention to that part of the site.
Still... For many Chicago journalists, it became a venue to release stuff that nobody else would publish - or, for those who wound up having non-journalist day jobs, a place to do some stuff they would rather be doing for money. Many journalists and writers that went on to bigger, money-paying things got some stuff to put on their resume thanks to Gapers Block. And, after 12 years in existence, the site became a respected part of Chicago media landscape. Being published on it had value - just not the monetary one.
In his letter to the readers, Huff was pretty candid about why he decided to stop publishing. Gapers Block has always been a labor of love, and because he didn't have money to pay people, he wound up writing and editing the majority of what went up. Which was fine for the first few years, but after a while, he felt burned out. He kept going because he didn't want Gapers Block to just end. But now, he is in the process of taking over his father's company, which eats up his free time. Last summer, Huff hired Mike Ewing to do the bulk of writing and editing. That worked well for all involved... Until Huff ran out of money to pay Ewing, who took another, better-paying job.
Huff wrote that he found that he liked all the free time he had not writing/editing for Gapers Block, and he just didn't have it in him to go back to the old schedule. He wrote that, if someone would want to take over the site, he would certainly consider passing it on. But Huff argued that he wasn't holding his breath - the site design was in need of a major update, and there is the whole web hosting costs thing. Gapers Block never brought in that much revenue, and whoever takes it over would need to figure out a way to cover those costs.
I've devoted plenty of digital ink to all of the Chicago newspapers and magazines that shut down (or barely made it past first issue), but the Internet is littered with corpses of Chicago digital media outlets that couldn't survive - Chicago News Cooperative, the Brown Line Media websites... Even DNAinfo Chicago, which produces some of the best reporting in the city, has been struggling to become profitable. Many neighborhood news outlets - the Uptown Update, Crime in Wrigleyville & Boystown, Sixth Ward, Sloopin - are labors of love and/or outrage, and survive purely because their owners believe in them.
It hasn't been a good week for the print media, either. The day the Gapers Block announcement went up, Extra newspaper announced that December 18 issue would be its last.
Extra has been published on Chicago's Northwest Side since 1980. As publisher Mila Tellez wrote in her farewell letter, the paper was launched because the English-language community newspapers that served the area were growing out of touch with its increasingly Spanish-speaking population. This was the time when Wicker Park, Bucktown, Logan Square, East Village, Humboldt Park and Avondale were either largely Puerto Rican/Mexican or had significant Hispanic populations. So Extra became bilingual, with everything from editor's note to articles to event calendar published in both English and Spanish. By the time I started reading it back in 2006, the paper didn't just cover the Northwest Side - it covered all of the city's Spanish-speaking communities and generally dealt with city-wide and national issues that were relevant to that population.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that Extra's managing editor for the past year is a friend of mine. Back when I was blacklisted by Tribune, he was one of the first people I reached out to. He offered me a gig, but nothing ever really came of it).
According to Tellez' farewell letter, the factors that affect all newspapers - the shift of advertising to digital, the fact that fewer people pick up physical copies of any newspaper - affected Extra. But, by the looks of things, it wasn't the only thing that did it in.
Another area that has been affected has been the small entrepreneur. With the increase in property taxes in the city of Chicago, storefronts are once again becoming empty and there is a large decrease in small business. Case in point is the Little Village area on 26th Street as well as the Humboldt Park area. Our own building at 3906 W North Ave. had their taxes increased by 100 percent in the last two years. This is not sustainable for a community newspaper or any other small business.
Now, I've seen what their building looks like. My first thought was 'this can't possibly cost that much in property taxes. But community newspapers have always operated on fairly thin margins. Many of the businesses that advertised in Extra when it launched simply aren't there anymore. With sources of revenue shrinking, I can see how the increase of property taxes on their building would become a straw that broke the camel's back.
Extra's newspaper officesThat said, I do feel there's one factor Tellez wasn't mentioning. Since Extra launched, the area it served has changed again. Wicker Park and Bucktown were pretty gentrified and way less Hispanic by the early 2000s, and I've seen Logan Square gentify before my eyes over the past 10 years. The future of Humboldt Park isn't settled, but its eastern sections have definitely seen gentrification.
Extra never really tried to appeal to the new residents.
I have a feeling that, even if the Internet didn't disrupt all newspapers' advertising-based revenue model, Extra would find itself in the same position as its former competitors found themselves in 35 years ago - grappling for relevance in a rapidly changing community.
(But I would be remiss not to note that the one newspaper that has tried to appeal to the changing population - Logan Square based Nothing Less newspaper - only lasted a few issues. The West Town edition of the Chicago Journal, which launched a few years earlier, only lasted a few years. The other efforts have been websites that occasionally released annual print magazines. Chicago Pipeline website, which covered Bucktown and Wicker Park, essentially folded when its owner was hired by DNAinfo Chicago. Our Urban Times is still around, and so is Logan Squarist. From what I understand, like Gapers Block, they don't pay its writers.)
If it was just Extra announcing its closure, this post would be yet another in a long series of posts marking the decline of print media. But the fact that both Extra and online-only Gapers Block announced their closure on the same day highlights something important. Simply going digital is not a cure-all. Whether you are in print or online, you need money to survive. And generating revenue in media landscape that seems to change faster and faster every year is not going to get any less challenging.