Seven years ago, one of Saipan Tribune’s contributors asked me if there was some sort of collusion between the Saipan Tribune and its competitor, the Marianas Variety. Did the two newspapers share information and have some sort of backdoor deal to explain their similar top stories and sometimes nearly identical headlines.
Absolutely not, I replied.
As I explained at the time to YoungStyle contributor Alex Megino, the Saipan Tribune and Marianas Variety have their own editorial teams. The Tribune had its own reporter covering the legislature, and the Variety has its own reporter there. In fact, the Marianas Variety’s editor and I, as editor of Saipan Tribune at the time, were both so busy that we had only managed to meet twice in the last 20 years.
“We are actually in competition for news stories every day,” I told Alex.
The thing is, Saipan and the greater Northern Mariana Islands is a very small region for news coverage, so it’s inevitable that both newspapers will have the same stories, especially major events, and sometimes even have the same headline. That is only a coincidence.
This has prompted some people to think wrongly that Saipan is too small to sustain two newspapers, that one newspaper should be enough to sustain news coverage across the entire CNMI.
I disagree. It’s not as if either the Tribune or Variety has a large staff capable of covering all areas of the islands and reporting on everything. Neither the Variety nor the Tribune has enough reporters and correspondents.
Yes, both newspapers are in competition, but I welcome this competition because it benefits the reading public. “Sometimes, we have stories that the Variety does not have and sometimes they have stories that we don’t have. That is information that gets out and redounds to the benefit of the public,” I told Alex.
Now comes news that the Tribune’s owner, TanHoldings Corp., has decided to shut down the newspaper on Dec. 31, 2024, citing economic reasons, including the paper’s financial losses and the migration of most ad revenue to social media and the internet. I am no longer with the newspaper, so I am not privy to what led to this business decision, but as a journalist, I lament this loss.
As I described it to a friend, this is akin to another “small death” for community journalism, another instance of death by a thousand cuts, when community newspapers across the nation are strangled to death by the insatiable vacuum that is online news consumption.
Essentially, most people now get their news from social media and read the news on the internet. That has resulted in ad revenue—the main source of income for many news outfits—being hoovered up by online companies like Meta and Google, leaving many small news outfits struggling.
A quick Google search shows that nearly 1,800 newspapers, mostly small weekly publications, closed between 2004 and 2018, with many local newspapers experiencing closures and reduced staff due to online news consumption. Others, like the Guam-based Pacific Daily News, transformed themselves into exclusively online news providers, while others have cut down on the number of print copies, electing to focus mainly on online content.
Unfortunately, closing the Saipan Tribune does not only mean the shutdown of a company. That is merely the small picture. The bigger picture is more complex. On the surface, it’s the loss of an outlet that’s intended to provide the reading public—and the larger CNMI community—accurate and timely information. Fewer reporters mean bigger stories falling through the cracks.
But journalism is not just about event-driven coverage. It’s not just about reporting when somebody is killed. Journalism is also about exposing crime, wrongdoing, or instances of corruption. Fewer outlets reporting on these matters means even more ways for malfeasance to happen. Evil happens in the dark, and journalism’s role of shining a light on dark and opaque matters discourages immoral behavior.
Major national news outlets are not keen in covering what is happening in our backyard. That is the role of local journalism. We call it “hyper-local journalism,” like when you report on a PTA scandal or an hours-long lockdown at a local high school because of a bomb threat. Readers of community newspapers depend on local newspapers to keep them updated on what is going on around them—events that big national newspapers typically ignore.
Everyone in the CNMI knows this: When Typhoon Yutu devastated the CNMI in 2018, exactly how many national news outlets reported extensively on the disaster? Zero. That’s right. As one foreign reporter said, no one died, so they were not interested. (There were some deaths but they happened after the typhoon.)
And who gave blow-by-blow coverage and back-to-back news reports? The local journalists. Reporters from local TV, radio and newspapers were on the ground just minutes after Yutu winds blew off the islands. And because of that informal network created by the disaster, news coverage was focused, relentless, and covered a sector wider than what the reporters could have achieved on their own. That is the kind of journalism you won’t get with national news outlets.
With the Saipan Tribune folding, Marianas Variety carries the burden as the only source of printed news in the Northern Marianas. Yet still, there will inevitably be patchy coverage, when a reporter won’t be able to go to an event because he or she is stuck in another event.
Another aspect the Tribune’s owner seems willing to cede is the power that comes with owning a newspaper. As often stated in a saying, “Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” There is some quarrel over who coined the phrase, but it highlights the point that owning a newspaper—or any media for that matter—gives you a bigger ability to tell your side of a story if conflict arises. That is why Elon Musk bought Twitter. That’s why Rupert Murdoch isn’t letting go of Fox News.
In the matter of damage control, having your own newspaper gives you the chance to publicize your version of the story, essentially a plainer restatement of Winston Churchill’s saying, “History is written by the victors.” You get to control the narrative. And what is a newspaper but the first draft of history?
At this point, closing the Saipan Tribune is not just a setback for TanHoldings Corp, it is also a huge blow to its many competent and loyal employees.
Oh, I have no doubt its people will land on their feet—they collectively transformed the paper from a company mouthpiece into a true newspaper, with loyalties to history and the CNMI.
But I sincerely hope the Saipan Tribune itself will not be relegated to becoming just another footnote in CNMI history. It deserves far more than becoming just another tragic story.