Changes in Ownership Affect Quality of Oshkosh Paper

Oshkosh, Wisc., was never a great newspaper town, but it has been a town with a great many newspapers. In its first 50 years, more than 50 were started or restarted there, including nine that were published in German. With names like the True Democrat, the Greenback Standard, the Fox Valley Courier and the Oshkosh Chief, these papers chronicled the growth of a small trading village as it profited from its proximity to the north woods of Wisconsin to become a bustling center of logging and lumbering.1 By the late 19th century, its riverfront mills were turning out so many planks, shingles, doors and window sashes that it had earned the nickname of Sawdust City. But only one of its early papers survived into the 21st century, a publication now known as the Oshkosh Northwestern. Thanks to enlightened owners who invested heavily in the cutting edge technology of the day-linotypes and stereotyping and private telegraph wires-the paper was able to bill itself in the early 1900s as "Wisconsin's Greatest Family Newspaper."2 In the fall of 1997, however, the two families that owned it brought in a team of consultants to upgrade the publication-improvements that set the stage for the paper to be sold three times in less than three years.On July 21, 2000, the Northwestern became property No. 87 in America's largest chain, made up then of the 94 daily newspapers of Gannett Co. Inc. That was the date when Gannett completed a $1 billion transaction with Thomson Inc. that included the Northwestern. For Gannett, the deal meant that its chain of dailies would exceed 90 papers while for the Northwestern it meant its fourth owner in slightly more than two years. During that time the paper passed from family ownership to a family owned newspaper chain to an international media conglomerate and finally to the largest U.S. publicly owned newspaper chain. The paper's rapid-fire change in ownership brought a certain degree of notoriety in the industry and also created an opportunity to investigate whether different forms of ownership are associated with differing quality, quantity and content of news coverage.3 Numerous previous studies have measured the effects of ownership changes or compared the characteristics of papers under different ownership arrangements. What's unusual here is the opportunity to study the sequential effects of ownership changes at the same publication and then to compare the impact of two different chain owners on the same paper.Research QuestionsRQ1:Did the quantity of news coverage in the Oshkosh Northwestern change under various ownership regimes?RQ2:Did the quality of news coverage in the Oshkosh Northwestern change under various ownership regimes?RQ3:Did the subject matter of news coverage in the Oshkosh Northwestern change under various ownership regimes?RQ4:How do the two recent chain owners of the Oshkosh Northwestern compare in the changes they made to the quantity, quality and content of news coverage in the paper?This paper begins with a literature review and background discussion. The next section describes the methodology of this study, which is followed by the presentation of data from a content analysis conducted in summer 2002 and a discussion of these findings in light of the effects of changing economic conditions. The final section offers some conclusions.Background and Literature ReviewAbout 10 percent of the newspapers sold during the 1980s were resold within a few years.4 By the mid-1990s, chains were buying and selling papers from each other at such a rapid pace that one broker estimated that 75 percent of all newspaper sales in 1996 were from one chain to another.5 Walton noted that between 1994 and 2000 more than 100 daily papers were sold between two and four times.6 While previous studies have attempted to look at the effects on newspapers that change from independent to chain ownership, the more specific case of a newspaper moving from one chain owner to another has gotten little detailed attention. …