“Some people thought we’d fold our tent within a month, and we’re still up and running. So I think people are taking note now.”– Paul Giblin, Arizona Guardian

The New Age of Ads
For journalism, the problems go far beyond the troubles plaguing so many of the nation’s industries during the current economic downturn. They are, in fact, part of a seismic shift in the very model that has kept the modern news organization alive for more than a century: advertising.

Most news outlets survived on this model for decades, and ran a lucrative business doing so. Newspapers were essentially in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. Businesses paid big money to get their message directly to those readers. (The New York Times is reported to charge more than $165,000 for a full-page ad to run just one day.) In turn, that money supported the newsgathering operations, or, as media analyst Clay Shirky once put it: Wal-Mart was subsidizing the Baghdad bureau.

Even the everyman who wanted to, say, sell a bicycle or rent out a room could buy a smaller, cheaper classified ad in most newspapers, reaching a huge audience for just a small amount of money. The combination of all those ads helped keep the expensive, labor-intensive editorial side of the newspaper in business. The same principle applied to TV, radio and magazines.

Then came the Internet, a force that quickly upended the advertising model and caught many news executives off guard.

Today on the Web, a business owner can buy advertising from media companies that heavily track the reading habits of Web surfers. That means a computer company in Scottsdale can buy ads that are seen only by people searching the terms “computer” or “Scottsdale” online, making their ad far more effective. And those highly effective ads are often far cheaper than any newspaper could charge. Oh, and those classified ads bought by the everyman? They’re now free through sites like Craigslist.org.

The result has been a steady drain of cash from old media into new, and the old media has not yet figured out how to catch up. This has left newsrooms nationwide without the funding to pay reporters, editors, photographers, producers, artists and all the other staffers who are a part of reporting and presenting the news.

Bob Grossfeld- Newspaper layoffs were shortsighted, says the Guardian’s publisher. “I was seeing easy choices being made. There are a lot of alternatives to axing people.”

In Phoenix, none of the major media outfits have been immune to such cutbacks. Take The Arizona Republic, for example. After cutting more than 150 people from its staff in 2008, the state’s largest newspaper announced in January it hadn’t done enough. The remaining workers – journalists, sales representatives, press workers and the like – were told they needed to take an unscheduled week off without pay by the end of March. When April 1 arrived, employees were told they would need to cut back again, this time by taking as many as two weeks off without pay by the end of June. Every three months, the paper’s employees and readers have to wonder, what’s next?

For the people in the position of making these decisions, the choices aren’t at all easy. Chris Coppola, who took over as editor of the East Valley Tribune after the January layoffs, talked about the cuts in light of the newspaper’s Pulitzer Prize win. He says the layoffs were never easy, but the fact that so many of the people who worked on the prize-winning project were lost in the downsizing was difficult. “It made it all that much more painful to us,” he says.

Coppola has been with the Tribune since 1990 and had worked with some of the staffers who were laid off since his first day there. “I didn’t need to see those guys win a Pulitzer Prize to know that we were losing talented people already,” Coppola says. “The Pulitzer just affirmed it. It was the ultimate affirmation of their talent.”

He’s also a realist, knowing the organization at half its size will never be able to do what it used to do, no matter the talent that’s left. “When you lose that many people... you’re just not going to be able to do a lot of the same things to the same degree as we have before,” he says.

For the staffers of the Guardian, that reality lands in equal measure on them, too. The luxuries of working for a newspaper – where expenses are reimbursed and the pens and notepads are always stocked in a cabinet by the door – are long gone.

Expenses now have to be cut at every turn. On the morning before the Pulitzer Prizes were announced, Paul Giblin took a city bus Downtown from the Capitol to cover a story. It was cheaper that way. “I didn’t want to pay for the $12 parking,” he explains. Midway into the event he was covering, his phone started lighting up with the news from New York.

Almost immediately, Giblin realized there was no rushing back to the office to celebrate. He was at the mercy of the free Downtown circular to shuttle him back to the office. “There I was on the phone,” Giblin says, “accepting congratulations for winning the Pulitzer with a bus full of homeless people.”

That’s part of the excitement of starting this new business. Some days they’re just scraping by. But they’re doing the work they love and earning money doing it. And for now, that’s the goal, says Giblin, who has a wife and two sons. “I wasn’t trying to save journalism,” he says over lunch at his north Phoenix home. “I was just trying to keep bratwursts on the table.”

The Guardian staff won’t say exactly how many subscribers they have – only putting the number in the hundreds – but after just four months in, there was an indication that the goal of food on the table was attainable. On the day of the Pulitzer announcement, they had just cut themselves their second round of paychecks. Epler deemed it “Pulitzer and paycheck day,” as if each was an equal marker of success.

“Some people thought we’d fold our tent within a month,” Giblin says. “And we’re still up and running. So I think people are taking note now.”

Even so, the Guardian is just barely an infant in the media world, small but growing. It remains uncharted land for the journalists involved, and each acknowledges the entire operation could fold before the year is up if things don’t fall their way.

“I wake up every day fearing subscriptions are going to drop off dramatically,” says Dennis Welch. “Every day you wake up and it’s like, I don’t want to go out of business today.”