Virginia Loses 1st Newspaper (Official Dinosaur Media Wake®)

The Clarke Courier was a small newspaper for a small place. Its circulation was but 2,240, but in a county of just 14,000 people, that meant that if you wanted to know what was going on in Clarke, you had better check the Courier.

No more. The Courier last week became Virginia's first paid circulation newspaper to die in the epidemic of closings, layoffs and cutbacks that are part of the dismantling of the American news infrastructure. It won't be the last.

More than 10,000 journalism jobs have disappeared from U.S. newspapers so far this year, a pittance compared to what the automobile industry is going through, but a huge excision from the country's newsgathering and reporting capabilities. And in communities such as Clarke--located just beyond the edge of sprawl west of Loudoun County (Routes 7 and 50 go through it)--

The paper was just sold to a new owner last year. But the publisher of the Winchester Star was unable to save the Courier. The problem was not circulation or readership--they held steady, as they have for most community weeklies. After all, local news is one commodity that is still available primarily from newspapers--the wire services and aggregators (YahooNews, Google News, etc.) that have turned national and foreign news into a nameless, brandless stream of free, raw data don't handle local news. But ad revenue, the lifeblood of journalism, dried up, both because of the recession and because of the massive shift of advertisers' dollars, interest and energy from the old standby of print papers to a hodgepodge of other outlets, both online and not (mostly to nowhere, actually--this is the great unwritten story of the dismantling of the news industry, the concomitant decline of the advertising and public relations businesses).

Falls Church News-Press.

Reports and carries the local news but - quite avocationally - sings a far leftie liberal tune at every conceivable opportunity. Editor/owner sincerely believes the success of his small time fishwrap is due to his trumpeting of leftist sentiment, and he editorializes about this phenomenon quite regularly.

The FCNP is a swooning and unabashed Obama lover (in a town that voted 70 percent for Zer0); carries the full slate of NY Slimes syndicated idiots, with illiterate Commmie 5th-columnist Helen Thomas as an apertif; crams every single possible morsel of leftist pablum and effluvia into every weekly issue, believing the readers demand it.

The paper went markedly out of control upon Zer0’s election and then inauguration, but I think times will eventually temper this maniacal trajectory. For the moment, I sense that the editor/owner is having a bit of a mild economic hangover from the heady recent months of his Obama binge.

Did I mention his rabid hatred for all conservatives and also his obsessive disdain (previously expressed weekly in print) for the despised troika of Bushitler, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Oh yes. Just as expected.

Generally speaking I’d say small town local newspapers like the FCNP have a bit of a niche for those who love the local news profession and are willing to work hard at it. And so long as they include enough local news and sports they might even be able to get away with publishing yoyos such as Helen Thomas, MoDo, Krugman, and the other Slimes lineup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising

In June 1836, French newspaper La Presse is the first to include paid advertising in its pages, allowing it to lower its price, extend its readership and increase its profitability and the formula was soon copied by all titles.

http://earlyradiohistory.us/sec020.htm

COMMERCIAL SPONSORSHIP

In February, 1922, AT&T announced its plan to establish a national radio network and sell airtime — which it called “toll broadcasting” — for programs supported by advertising. At this time AT&T believed, based on patent rights it claimed under a series of cross-licencing agreements made with various companies including General Electric and Westinghouse, that it was the only company in the U.S. allowed to operate broadcasting stations, with the exception of a few permitted to other companies under the cross-licencing agreements, plus a small number of stations which had purchased Western Electric transmitters. The idea of radio stations broadcasting commercial messages was, however, very controversial. In the summer of 1922, there were already concerns about stations including commercial messages, as Radio: Problem Created by Advertising, from the August 13, 1922 New York Times, complained that “Many a concert or lecture has been spoiled by a station broadcasting advertising information such as the price of eggs or the bargains at some store.” In the July, 1922 issue of The Radio Dealer, a letter from AT&T Publicity Department employee J. H. Ellsworth gave AT&T’s side of the debate in Explains Broadcasting of Advertising Programming, stating that “the fear which is sometimes expressed that advertising will destroy broadcasting is seen to be without foundation”. But another Publicity Department employee, Westinghouse’s J. C. McQuiston, was more skeptical, and in his article appearing in the August, 1922 Radio News, Advertising by Radio. Can It and Should It Be Done?, a caption editorialized that “Advertising by radio cannot be done; it would ruin the radio business, for nobody would stand for it”. And a letter from Hugo Gernsback — now sixteen years removed from the days when he had introduced Telimco Wireless Outfits — proclaimed that “If the future of radio rests upon a foundation of advertising, it would be better that broadcasting did not exist at all”, according to Radio and Advertising, printed in the May 6, 1923 New York Times.

Yes they have, and you're asserting this alienation played little --if any-- role in their imminent demise? See my apparently antiquated POV dictated because they aliented so many, they hung themselves.

I cite as evidence the difficulty conservative newspapers have had establishing themselves. The Washington Times has never made the first dime of profit and is heavily subsidized. Also see upthread the conservative Philly newspaper that folded.

That said, witness the relative success of Fox News as an alternative to CNN and MSNBC. By all accounts, it makes a lot of money for Rupert.

Clearly there are a lot of reasons for the failure of the newspaper model, but the bias certainly did not assist their longevity.

Absolutely! What business starts out antagonizing half its customers? The only reason they got away with it for as long as they did was because of their near-monopoly of paper information distribution.

One other point. Conventional wisdom says that the Drive-By Media was relatively unbiased until about 30 or 40 years ago. I'm not so sure about that. I opine that they've always been biased but until recent years, there was no way to counter it.

Well they may have been biased around 1960, but there were many which were biased to the right. They had a tendency to be the afternoon papers, which were read on mass transit commutes, and which were devastated by evening news broadcasts, which changed from 15 minutes of national and 15 minutes of local news, weather and sports. to the current 30 minutes and 30 to 60 minute broadcasts. Also everyone started commuting by automobile, where, hopefully, they were NOT reading the paper.

The NY Daily news was right wing, as was the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis News, the Phoenix Gazette, the St. Louis Globe Democrat and the Oakland Tribune, along with most Hearst papers. The NY Herald Tribune was the great standard bearer for centrist (RINO) and liberal Republicans. Almost all Florida papers, other than the Miami Herald, were conservative to far right. There were hundreds of other non-liberal papers around the country.

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