By Bob Allen
The Baptist Standard, long the largest and one of the most influential of state Baptist newspapers, is reducing staff at the end of the year as part of a series of cost-cutting measures.
Founded in 1888, the Standard joins a number of historic denominational publications facing what Editor Marv Knox termed a “perfect storm” of challenges.
“The newspaper industry began to decline nationwide in the 1980s, and it spiraled with the advent of the Internet and digital media,” Knox explained in a Baptist Standard story Dec. 19. “Simultaneously, Baptists endured civil war, and at its conclusion, post-denominationalism engulfed American churches, weakening state and national conventions.”
Finally, Knox said, economic forces prompted many congregations that long purchased Baptist newspaper subscriptions for every member to eliminate budget items “they did not feel were mandatory” to the congregation’s life.
The Standard will eliminate three of its seven full-time staff effective Jan. 1. Three employees losing jobs have a combined tenure of 75 years. Knox described the layoffs as “a difficult decision for our board of directors to make and for the staff to implement.”
It will also reduce frequency of Common Call, a feature-oriented magazine launched when the Baptist Standard moved to digital-only delivery in 2012, from monthly to quarterly.
Knox said declines in advertising by the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the challenge of monetizing digital media made the latest cutbacks mandatory.
Other historic denominational publications face similar choices. The nation’s oldest Baptist paper, the 193-year-old Christian Index in Georgia, ceases print publication Jan. 1 and will be available online only.
Overseas, the Baptist Times, an award-winning newspaper published weekly for British Baptists for 156 years, went out of business in 2011 after losing its subsidy from the Baptist Union in Great Britain.
After a readership survey, Baptist and Reflector, published for 180 years in Tennessee, recently pledged to publish a print newspaper every two weeks for the “foreseeable future,” with “no guarantee” of how long it will be before it becomes available only online.
Founded under private ownership, the Baptist Standard early on faced competition intense enough to erupt in an exchange of gunfire between rival editors aboard the same train to Nashville, Tenn., for the Southern Baptist Convention in 1904.
Ownership transferred to the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1915. In 1919 the Baptist Standard played a leadership role in the 75 Million Campaign, forerunner to the Cooperative Program.
The newspaper weathered the fundamentalist/modernist controversy in the 1920s, defending BGCT leaders from personal attacks by controversial fundamentalist J. Frank Norris.
In his 1995 history of the Southern Baptist Press Association, denominational journalist William Junker said the total circulation of Baptist newspapers in 1900 was probably less than 40,000. Their subscribers, however, provided a ready audience to help build a Southern Baptist identity in the first half of the 20th century.
A 1914 report to the Southern Baptist Convention recommended denominational ownership, a Baptist paper in every state and each state with only one Baptist paper.
In the 1930s the church-budget plan, with congregations purchasing subscriptions for a group or every member, became the wave of the future, boosting the combined circulation of Baptist state newspapers from 143,000 in 1933 to 547,000 in 1845.
Texas pastor George W. Truett spoke of the importance of state Baptist newspapers at the 1940 SBC annual meeting in Baltimore. A new committee was appointed to increase their circulation led by Louie Newton, SBC president in 1947 and 1948 who served 40 years as pastor of Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The circulation of Baptist state papers topped 1 million in 1953 and continued to grow until reaching a peak of 1.8 million subscribing households in 1977.
The presences of “denominational press” reports at SBC annual meetings testified to the Baptist state newspapers’ importance for raising money and awareness of Baptist programs and defending the Baptist faith against distortion during times of doctrinal controversy.
At the same time, several of the papers hired trained journalists, occasionally raising issues of editorial freedom. Those flashpoints turned to warfare in the “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and 1990s, when change-oriented conservatives viewed the Baptist editors as defenders of the status quo and many non-aligned pastors allowed every-family-plan subscriptions to lapse so church members would not be exposed to “negative” news.
Combined circulation dipped back below 1 million in 2007. The 2014 SBC annual lists the combined readership of Baptist state newspapers as 655,700.
In 1980 the Baptist Standard’s circulation stood at 392,196. By 1990, the end of the most intense decade of the “conservative resurgence” era, the number dropped to 291,890. Added competition for readers came with a rival Baptist state convention with its own newspaper launched in 1999. The 2011 SBC annual reported Baptist Standard’s print circulation at 30,133.
Another historic Baptist paper facing similar trends, Virginia’s Religious Herald, merged with Associated Baptist Press to form Baptist News Global in 2013. The Baptist Standard, a longtime publishing partner with both organizations, discussed joining the merger but opted in September to “temporarily suspend” talks until at least next summer.