The great newspaper massacre of 2008
The newspaper industry’s head is dead, but the body doesn’t know it yet. I’m not talking about the slow, steady decline in circulation and the march of newspaper closings that started in the 1960s. In just the last few months, that lingering disease morphed into a full-on chainsaw massacre, complete with updated versions of Leatherface and Chop Top. Consider recent events. The Rag Blog reported that The New York Times has a $400 million loan payment due in May 2009, and currently has only $46 million cash on hand. The Christian Science Monitor revealed in October that it will close its 100-year-old print edition in 2009. Two weeks ago, the Boston Globe cut back to four sections to reduce print costs. In October, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger, announced that it’s laying off half its newsroom staff. The Los Angeles Times and San Jose Mercury News staffs are both half of what they were as recently as 18 months ago. Thirteen newspapers in Connecticut, including two medium-sized dailies, are heading for shutdown because the indebted owner can’t find buyers for them. By the end of this year, the nation’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, will have cut 20 percent of its staff.
Most people don’t care that newspapers are in their death spiral. Those who don’t read get their news from broadcast, cable and radio. Those who do read have gone online to Web sites and blogs. The future belongs to electronic news delivery.
Just one thing. Broadcast, cable, radio and online? They get most of their leads and raw information from newspapers and the Associated Press, which is a cooperative that gets most of its news from its member newspapers. You don’t have to be a biologist to see the impending food chain breakdown here. The newer news mediums need newspapers, as does American society at large. We might not need them in their current form, but we need what they do.
Newspapers are the foundation of an informed society – its first witness. Newspapers are low tech on the front end (reporters only need a notebook and a 39-cent felt tip to cover a story) so they can commit reporters to stories that other media can’t. Newspaper reporters can sit through four-hour zoning board meetings to make sure the local Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t expand its parking lot onto a wetland. They can dig through decades of court records to reveal sexual abuse by clergymen across the country. By comparison, video crews can’t be idle for that long, and bloggers are usually one-person shops who can only cover a limited amount of stories at once.
Newspaper reporting, for all its oft-mentioned flaws, is the photosynthesis of the news ecosystem; it feeds everything above it. Broadcast and cable follow up newspaper articles with their own reports, bringing the news to a broader audience. Bloggers comment and contribute their own knowledge, correcting and expanding on stories that they would probably have missed if they hadn’t read it in a newspaper. The news ecosystem will not collapse without newspapers, but there’s no way it will uncover important new stories at the pace it does now. That’s not good for society. Fear of exposure is a powerful motivator for governments, businesses and individual to mind their manners. Newspapers have historically done most of the watching and scolding.
So after economic and cultural factors – the aforementioned Leatherface and Chop Top – are done hacking away at the print newspaper corpus with their Black & Deckers, what will take the print newspaper’s place? I vote for the online newspaper. Yeah, I know that the online editions of most papers contribute little to the revenue stream – for now. But newspapers that take risks and work aggressively to use their brand equity and news gathering ability to attract readers and advertisers to the Web will come out of the other end of today’s chainsaw abattoir playing the same role in the news industry as their print forbearers.
There are signs of newspapers making this shift. The Madison, Wis. Capital News shut down its print edition in April to focus on its online operations. Now the Times breaks news through the day like a radio station, but with the depth and detail of print. Here in Portsmouth, our local daily gives readers more content by supplementing its articles with video clips and online photo galleries. This is the kind of thinking that will save newspapers. If readers follow the content, advertisers will follow the readers and newspapers will once again have a viable business model. Society, in turn, will keep its biggest, toughest watch dog on duty, which is good news for all of us.
Yes, print newspaper readers are more likely to be over age 45 -- but they will not be dying off too soon...
Here is one study (there are many out there):
According to the 2008 Readership Institute, Northwestern University tracking study of newspaper and online readership in 100 U.S communities:
- Readership among 18-24-year-olds in the general population continues to slowly decline; but the habit is fairly stable for 45-plus.
- 62 percent of respondents said they had never visited the local newspaper's Website, and only 14 percent said they had visited between the last seven to 30 days, numbers that have improved only a little over the last five year
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa...
The closing of daily and regional newspapers, because they’ve been encumbered with backbreaking debt appears to be first, irresponsible capitalism and secondly and foremost, an assault on free speech. As we all know, newspapers, and the unbiased third estate it represents, are an integral part of the functioning of a free and democratic society, which depends on having an educated and informed public.
The fact that over the past ten years buyouts and consolidations have cost 12,000 journalists their jobs, leaves me to believe that the disbanding of a free press, especially classic investigation, in America, may have been the true agenda. If closings continue, as they seem to be slated to do, this country will have one or two corporate news outlets, filtering and choosing what news is fit to print. Quite frankly if the only media left standing in a year or two is USA Today, Bloomberg, Forbes, and CNN, America will only have corporate media bites to inform them and that’s unacceptable.
The time may have come for alternative ownership options.
Newspapers are profitable businesses generally showing a 15% to 20% profit margin. They create jobs, take people off unemployment insurance, welfare and food stamp lines. These jobs pay mortgages and rent and generate disposable income for its employees to use in businesses within their vicinity and most importantly, it keeps the citizenry informed on local, regional, state and national issues. Furthermore, these jobs generate incomes from which taxes and social security can be paid.
Not only is the newspaper business basically a very sound and reliable investment it’s a necessary civic investment and as such requires adequate representation in a free diverse media marketplace. This diversity is essential.
Perusing a newspaper requires a very different mental acuity and in many cases preference and consequently becomes a unique experience which is totally different from scrolling and surfing through a web site. While on line distribution of the news is compatible with the printed newspaper, as mentioned in your article above, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an equal substitution.
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