Newspaper publishers are reportedly bracing for an industry collapse because of recently imposed tariffs on Canadian newsprint, triggering an unusual industry lobbying effort to staunch the financial hemorrhaging.
According to The Daily Beast, tariffs are raising newsprint costs as much as 30 percent.
For example, the Jackson County Sentinel and nine other community papers in the region are likely to see an estimated $100,000 annual hike in operating expenses, The Daily Beast reported.
“It’s not helping and not having the effect that I believe they thought it would. In fact, it’s causing financial harm to a lot of us,” Brandon Cox, the editor and publisher based in Scottsboro, Ala., told The Daily Beast on his way to Capitol Hill to discuss the issue.
Other publishers are also warning about a gutting of their outlets — a problem especially severe in rural areas that rely almost exclusively on print, according to The Daily Beast.
So the industry is taking its case to Washington.
“I’ve been doing this for close to thirty years,” Paul Boyle, senior vice president of public policy at the News Media Alliance, told The Daily Beast.
“This is the most existential issue I’ve faced. No question about it. I’ve heard from so many publishers who are perplexed that this can actually occur. They’re stunned and they’re saddened. They really feel that our industry has already been cut enormously, almost to the bone. And there is no ability to cut further other than taking more staff out. And that means less news.”
Boyle last week helped arrange a trip to Washington, D.C., for about 50 newspaper executives to meet with roughly 70 offices on the House and Senate side.
“The newspaper industry has been more aggressive on this than anything I can remember,” said one unnamed Senate aide whose office was on the receiving end of that lobbying campaign. “They clearly view it as a dire circumstance.”
According to The Daily Beast, the problem stems from a Department of Commerce preliminary decision announced in January to impose tariffs on Canadian paper at the urging of one mill in Washington State.
The North Pacific Paper Corp, owned by New York hedge fund One Rock Capital Partners, pushed for tariffs by noting investigators had found Canada was unfairly dumping newsprint on the U.S. market and subsidizing its own paper mills.
The mill’s 300 employees stand to benefit from the tariffs on Canadian suppliers. But newspaper industry officials argue the offsetting cost could be massive on 600,000 community newspaper jobs across the country.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, introduced legislation May 14 calling for suspending the imposed import taxes on groundwood paper until the Department of Commerce examined its effects on the broader printing and publishing industry.
By last Friday, 24 Senators had signed on to co-sponsor the legislation.
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