Tariff would jeopardize continued operation for many newspapers.
It’s been a tough time for newspapers. The market has been changing, and papers have struggled to match their business models with the digital world. But newspapers are still an important way for people to get local news. You must agree, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this newspaper.
That conduit for local news is threatened by a new tariff on newsprint from Canada announced by the Commerce Department last week. The tariff was prompted by a complaint from one paper mill in Washington state.
If the tariff goes through, it will raise the cost of paper for all newspapers, enough to jeopardize continued operation for many.
We know there are some who would greet this as good news. It has become fashionable to hate the media, to deride any news that challenges our perspective as “fake news.”
Others will say that this should push papers to become all-digital operations and leave behind the legacy of “dead tree media.” The truth is that most papers are working as hard as they can to become successful digitally, but they are still dependent on their print product for most of their revenue. If this tariff makes that print product unprofitable, people will lose local news.
Your newspaper is still your best source of local news. No one else covers Spartanburg County like the Herald-Journal does. No one else covers your city council, your county council, your school board. No one else keeps an eye on your local tax dollars and keeps you informed about the decisions that are being made that affect your community.
If a tariff is allowed to put some papers out of business, citizens in those communities will lose a vital source of information.
Congressman Ralph Norman, R-S.C., recognizes this. He is part of a bipartisan group of 33 members of Congress who sent a letter to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross asking him to reconsider the tariff.
“If these tariffs are put into place, over 600,000 jobs in an already declining industry would be put at risk or affected. Not only does this affect jobs, but also hurts all newspapers big and small. This especially threatens to put small newspapers out of business, essentially cutting off rural and small-town America from their local news,” Norman said in a statement released last month.
He went on to characterize the tariff as a handout from the government to the paper mill that requested the tariff.
We know it seems self-serving to editorialize against a tariff that would affect the newspaper business, but the fact is that this has become not just an issue for our business but for our community. We believe that newspapers like this one are necessary to the health of Spartanburg and similar areas around the nation. Federal officials should not take this vital source of local information away from communities through an unwise tariff.