Would a Merger Between the St. Louis Beacon and KWMU Rival the Struggling Post-Dispatch?

Rumor had it that the bust of Joseph Pulitzer in the lobby of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch still belonged to Emily Pulitzer, even though she sold the paper in 2005. Like most good rumors, it was too funny and fitting to be true. It would have been as if Georgia Frontiere had sold the Rams but kept the Super Bowl trophy as a remembrance of things past.

Alas, Tracy Rouch of the Post-Dispatch assures us that the part of Joseph Pulitzer that has not left the building—his bust—does belong to the Post, or rather to Lee Enterprises. Emily Pulitzer, known now for her art collection more than her past ownership of St. Louis’ daily paper of record, does remain in the media mix. She has provided more than $1.6 million to support the online St. Louis Beacon, which is planning a merger with the news crew at KWMU (90.7 FM).

The proposed amalgam of the Beacon staff and the local National Public Radio affiliate, aka St. Louis Public Radio, does not plan to replace or replicate what the Post-Dispatch was or is. Tim Eby, KWMU’s general manager, believes that combining the on-air and online capacities of the two entities will produce more and different original content.

“It’s an opportunity to expand the number of journalists working in our newsroom,” Eby says. “We’ll be putting more things in context as well as reporting what happened. We think we can do a better job by having more people.”

The Beacon is heavy on Post Toasties, former Post employees who jumped ship voluntarily or were forced to walk the plank. Of the 16 people listed as news staff on the Beacon’s online masthead, 11 are ex-Post employees. The Beacon also relies on dozens of freelancers, some of whom passed through the Post.

The Beacon is heavy on analysis and commentary. Its habit is to ignore crime, the courts, and sports. TV news it is not. Neither is it a newspaper with that breadth and depth of news coverage, nor does it have the overhead of a large staff, newsprint, and circulation.

KWMU, owned by the University of Missouri–St. Louis, has a news staff of 10 and posts much of its on-air content on its website. The Beacon and KWMU have already cross-pollinated to a degree on political coverage, and Beacon staff has appeared on KWMU programming.

One thing KWMU and the Beacon have in common is that profit is not their thing. They are both nonprofit entities, though that does not mean they are unconcerned with money. Nonprofit does mean you don’t have shareholders who worry about dividends, and you don’t have a primary reliance on advertisers whom you need to court and keep in a buying mode.

Donors and underwriters are needed, yet Eby says that is a fine line to walk, if and when the merger is completed.

“We have sponsorships,” Eby says. “What you won’t see is pop-up ads, high-end, flashy things. Some websites when you go to them, video commercials kick in—we won’t be doing anything like that.”  He points out that that the Saint Louis Art Museum has a sponsorship on the KWMU website that is “very tasteful.”

In other words, money still changes hands, only in different ways and in different amounts. The Beacon would not exist were it not for the largesse of Emily Pulitzer, who according to various media reports at the time, kicked in a $500,000 challenge grant when the Beacon began in 2008, and in 2011 donated $1.25 million. William Danforth put in $200,000 in 2008.

Other donor amounts are foggy, as the Post-Dispatch found out when it filed a request under the Missouri Sunshine Law asking for specifics. The Beacon didn’t release its donor data, citing that merger negotiations were ongoing.

The Post-Dispatch shadow extends beyond the Beacon’s staffing and Emily Pulitzer connections. Another major donor, former Post-Dispatch managing editor Richard Weil and his wife Josephine, donated $1.1 million in 2011.

How long this journalistic noblesse oblige can last and how much good journalism it can produce are open, legitimate questions. Relying on KWMU’s 10-person news staff, plus the Beacon’s 16 full-timers, and a boatload of freelancers does not at all equate to the Post-Disptach, which online lists more than 140 staffers. Of that number, 20 are in the sports department, and 12 are in photography, two areas the Beacon/KWMU hybrid largely plans to sidestep.

Yet the sand is slipping through the hourglass for the Post. The reason two-thirds of the Beacon’s staff—and a good number of its freelancers—are where they are is that the Post’s staff is shrinking, as is its circulation. The latest numbers are 167,999 for daily Monday through Friday, and 287,423 for Sunday. It was not that long ago, 10 years or so, that those numbers were 300,000 daily and 500,000 on Sunday. The Kansas City Star currently has a larger daily circulation than the Post-Dispatch.

In the digital sphere, the Post-Dispatch’s Rouch points out that the most recent count showed “56,963,682 monthly page views” to stltoday.com, up 11 percent from this time last year. She adds that there were “4,500,420 unique monthly visitors,” which is up 4 percent from last year. (The Beacon, meanwhile, has about 60,000 unique visitors per month.)

If more people are gazing at the Post-Dispatch website, that’s good news—but the rest of the story is pretty grim. In March, the Pew Research Center released a report showing that in 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 they gained in digital ads. That pace is quickening: In 2011, it fell at a 10-to-1 ratio.

In the last 10 years, print ads have fallen from $45 billion to $19 billion. Online ads rose from $1.2 billion to $3.3 billion. Of the lost print ad revenue, 43 percent was due to dwindling classified ads, and 40 percent was due to fewer retail ads.

When Emily Pulitzer made an estimated $414 million from the $1.46 billion sale of the Post-Dispatch and its minions in 2005, Lee was at $45 per share. Now it is trading for around $3.

Clearly, profits are leaving print journalism, which for decades had better profit margins than most oil companies. Those days are over, so maybe it makes sense, or at least is necessary, that nonprofits step into the breach.

But as David Simon, writer and producer of The Wire and refugee journalist, has said many, many times: You can’t do more with less.

Even the consultant hired to look at the KWMU/Beacon endeavor said this about the two entities in their current state: “Neither organization is consistently producing content that is explanatory or investigative in nature.”  In other words, it’s routine reporting, analysis, commentary, and lifestyle musings, what some might regard as high-brow stuff.

Eby hopes to change that, and points to The Texas Tribune as an online news source that does a good job covering that state. “Going the nonprofit route allows you to focus your mission around public service,” Eby says. “We want to do more data journalism. One project we started was updating information online about lobbyist gifts to state legislators.”

Eby is optimistic that the details of the merger, including UMSL students in some academic way having a role in the new media startup, will be resolved within months, if not weeks. Maybe then the comparison to the Post-Dispatch’s mission might be more apt, or perhaps moot.

When the Beacon was about to begin in 2005, it was going to be called “The Platform,” a clear nod to Joseph Pulitzer’s “platform” that is in raised stone letters on a wall in the newspaper’s lobby. It’s lofty stuff, uttered by the man whose name is on journalism’s most valued prize. It talks of  “attacking wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.” In what seemed to be a petty move, the Post-Dispatch quickly named a section of its website The Platform and claimed naming rights. So the new online news source was called the Beacon instead.

Wherever Joseph Pultizer’s bust rests in the future, and whoever owns it, there remains a need to continue the struggle against the predatory wrongs in society—and that struggle needs sufficient financing, skilled staffing, and an adequate audience.