By Joe Sheller / Guest Editorial
Welcome to America, Cedar Rapids. This is a country where, typically, regional and national corporations own our media.
While that’s a common reality in this country, it has not traditionally been the media environment here. In the Corridor, the news business has long had a single, local dominant player. The 800-pound gorilla is the publisher of our leading local daily newspaper, and also the owner of the market-leading TV station. Sure, there are other important media players, some local—like the Corridor Business Journal or Z102.9—and many others owned by multimarket media corporations.
But for residents of Cedar Rapids, the Corridor’s leading city, the main gatekeeper and agenda setter in the media has long been the powerful combination of The Gazette and KCRG, aka K-Cedar-Rapids-Gazette.
Of course, The Gazette has been buffeted in recent years by the gale-force winds of change that have howled through the newspaper world. Changing reader habits and the explosion of alternative, online news sources have eroded the influence of the Big G, just as they have every other city newspaper.
But I think Cedar Rapids has been sometimes fortunate to have had the unusual partnership of The Gazette and KCRG. That partnership only existed due to The Gazette’s early investment in the Cedar Rapids TV station. The Gazette was part of an investor group that began operating the TV station in 1953, and the newspaper bought out the other parties and took full control in 1954.
And give credit where it’s due—just because the paper owned the station, that doesn’t mean that the station had to be a market leader. I suppose the symbiotic relationship between the two helped, but KCRG has its share of talent, too.
So there have been basically two generations that grew up in the Corridor consuming much of their news from one local corporation.
And we have been fairly unusual in that respect. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rules against a person or company owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station in the same city—The Gazette was allowed to do so only because its ownership of KCRG began before the FCC enacted its rule. While in recent decades the FCC has removed many of its broadcast license ownership restrictions, it still prohibits a company that owns a daily newspaper from owning a TV station when “the station’s service contour encompasses the newspaper’s city of publication.”
We’re not in that unusual zone anymore. On Sept. 1, Gray Television of Atlanta, Georgia, an expanding acquirer of local TV stations, announced it had reached a $100 million deal with The Gazette to purchase KCRG.
Officials at Gray and The Gazette are saying that the viewer and reader won’t notice much difference—that the cordial relationship between The Gazette and KCRG will continue. But I wonder about the future. It’s one thing to cooperate when cooperation is promoted by common business ownership. But it is a heck of a lot easier to break up when you’re just casually dating rather than in a committed marriage.
It was only a year ago when The Gazette sold its downtown newspaper building and moved all of its news operations into the KCRG building. Now that it has sold the TV station, the shrinking and nomadic newspaper newsroom staff will be seeking a new home.
Well, $100 million will do more than solve that issue.
I wonder if the recent tussle KCRG had with Mediacom might have been one of the factors that convinced the powers-that-be at The Gazette that a lone local TV station can’t make it in today’s media world.
And it’s interesting to speculate on the strategies that both corporations are pursuing. In today’s changing media world, it’s hard to see TV’s future. I know I’m not alone as a consumer in getting much of my video content on an iPad or laptop. My TV sits cold and alone in a prominent place in rec room, rarely turned on, never tuned to a TV station (I watch local TV news either online or at the gym) and collecting dust. The set just sits there, becoming a relic, like a phone attached to a wire in the wall (although my wife reminded me that I do turn it on to indulge in old war movies.)
But here comes Gray, a successful, acquisitive company that is carving out its niche by buying market-leading local TV stations. To some extent, they are identifying the kinds of stations that reap financial windfalls due to the fountains of money pouring into our dysfunctional political system. They are betting that, as the media landscape shakes out, they are picking the long-term winners.
So both The Gazette and Gray are placing bets on the future of media. Both companies agree the independent TV station can’t handle the jungle that surrounds our global media village.
Welcome to America, land of large corporate media ownership, Cedar Rapids. We can only hope the change won’t make local news media less responsive to local needs.
Joe Sheller is associate professor of communication and journalism with Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids. He can be reached at jsheller@mtmercy.edu.
