Newspapers Hang Tough and When the Fine Print Matters

By Jon Greenberg on Friday, November 13, 2009.

In this week’s economic round-up, newspaper publishers hang on through the recession. The latest economic forecast calls for a slow crawl back to prosperity and a former homeowner tells how he fell into a peculiar little trap. NHPR’s Jon Greenberg has his weekly take on the economy.

You don’t need to be a news junkie to know that newspapers are in trouble. Readership has been falling for decades, then came the internet and now, this downturn. Geordie Wilson, publisher of the Concord Monitor, says if there’s one thing that keeps him up a night, it’s the economy.

WILSON: We’re getting hammered by this recession. We are an advertising supported medium and when the people who pay the bills suffer, we suffer too.

On the bright side, unlike some papers in other states, New Hampshire’s operations carry less debt. It looks like they can weather the storm but they didn’t get much good news this week from the New England Economic Partnership.

The forecasting group says a slow and weak recovery is in store. Commercial real estate will continue to be a drag on area banks and give them less room to lend. New Hampshire and Maine are expected to do a hair better than the rest of the region but job losses will continue into next year.

Personal and business bankruptcies have stayed on a record pace. There were 466 in October, including 14 businesses.

We read this bankruptcy story on the Working It Out blog. A history teacher that we’ll call Leon got caught in a Catch 22 when he tried to renegotiate his mortgage. His lender, Citi Mortgage, said he could get hardship relief but first he needed to miss three payments. Leon did what they said but he didn’t count on what the banks holding his credit cards would do just weeks after he let the first mortgage payment slide.

LEON: All the credit cards jumped from 3, 4 percent to 29.9. So it didn’t take long before I was buried by all of that.”

After three months, Leon talked to Citi Mortgage. As he tells it, they said they couldn’t help him because his credit record was so bad. Leon is paying nobody back these days. He’s waiting for the final steps of foreclosure.

In the category of down but not out, job seekers with Network for Work are having an interesting session next Thursday. The speaker will tell them how to tap into free federal and state training. The price of admission – food or money for the Nashua Soup Kitchen.

With this round up of the week’s economic news, I’m Jon Greenberg.