Posted on 03/20/2009 3:23:14 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
The death of a modern newspaper is a real-time, multimedia event. When journalists on the Rocky Mountain News were summoned to their Denver newsroom on February 26 to be told they were working on their final edition, they relayed the announcement through live blogs, online videos, slide shows of tearful colleagues and a minute-by-minute stream of updates on Twitter. “It’s odd to cover your own funeral,” read one tweet.
Bad news about America’s newspapers is tumbling out too fast for their presses to keep up. The closure of 'the Rocky' after 150 years capped a week in which the Journal Register Company and the 180-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer joined the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy proceedings.
Hearst is threatening to close the San Francisco Chronicle – and last Monday said it would make the Seattle Post-Intelligencer an online-only publication. Gannett, owner of USA Today, has followed The New York Times in slashing its dividend to preserve cash. Titles from the venerable Cincinnati Post to the six-year-old New York Sun have folded.
Obituaries for the news business are being written in newsrooms around the world as advertising revenues that long subsidised the cost of newsgathering shrink, just as digital media usurp print’s role as intermediary between advertisers and customers. The crisis is affecting not just newsprint: most news magazines, broadcast news outlets and newswires are also suffering.
Nowhere, however, has the impact been greater than in the US newspaper industry...
(Excerpt) Read more at businessspectator.com.au ...
The Seattle PI is gone ... hopefully the Times will follow shortly ... question then is, what will people do? How ever will they be able to line their bird cage - scoop up doggie doo ...
Particularly after your own suicide.
Until they wake up to thier bais (which is very doubtful) then they may gain viewers. There is no such thing as jounalist... just propagandsit for the DNC & ZERO.
A lot of the fault lies with you, sir.
I’m so envious.
And Craig’s list
“...The bankruptcies and closures prompted by a near one-third decline in advertising revenues since their 2005 peak have shattered those theories, leaving owners looking for new ideas. But what prospect is there of a solution when Barclays Capital predicts a further 21 per cent fall in newspaper advertising revenues this year alone?
A debate playing out in the pages of the properties it most concerns has focused on two new hopes: that charitable endowments may replace commercial business models and that readers who have grown accustomed to finding news for free online can be made to pay.
“Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance,” David Swensen and Michael Schmidt from Yale University’s endowment argued in The New York Times this year. The more than $US200 million annual cost of its newsroom could be covered, they estimated, by a $5 billion endowment that would guarantee its independence. Extrapolating from Yale’s calculations, the Nieman Journalism Lab estimated that it might cost $114 billion to subsidise every US paper.
Charitable models exist already: ProPublica, producing “investigative journalism in the public interest”, is supported by the Sandler Foundation and other trusts. MinnPost.com was set up in Minneapolis-St Paul with funding from local families and foundations.
Outside the US, the state is at times stepping in. France is injecting $776 million over three years by doubling government advertising in newspapers and offering tax breaks for publishers’ digital investments. UK local publishers are lobbying for looser competition rules to allow consolidation.
The idea of charitable or state assistance makes many uneasy. Subsidies could create unfair competition for commercial rivals. In any event, many endowments are already suffering market-driven declines. “The idea of charitable endowments is a bit of a red herring,” says Alan Mutter, a veteran newspaper editor who writes the influential Reflections of a Newsosaur blog..”
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Advertising revenue PEAKED in 2005? Hard to believe.
As to charitable endowments taking over, that is indeed a “red herring” considering the sort of endowments that might do that sort of thing, people would be even less inclined to read their content. In any case, the world of private charity is hurting—even those not stung by Bernie Madoff.
However, the Nieman Journalism Lab’s figure of $114 billion to subsidise every U.S. newspaper makes me nervous. That figure would not be beyond you-know-who contemplating a government takeover of the newspaper business.
LOL!
Quote of the day!
Moreover, advertising is more, and not less, prevalent on web-only newspapers. I have before me a copy of the NY Times. There is no advertising on the front page. I hit their website and there's quite a bit of it. Going to a subscriber-only model will decrease that ad revenue because it will decrease the number of hits. And so the balance between advertisement and subscription will be tilted still further toward that of the old and unsuccessful model. Somebody had better be thinking about this before putting in microcharges and going after "aggregators."
Because doing so opens the newspapers who do it up to competition from new online ones following the old paper model of depending on advertising for revenue, more attractive to advertisers because there isn't a subscription keeping the hits down. In short, changing medium didn't change that business dynamic, it only moved it around. My concern is that this business:
Newspapers should be exempted from antitrust restrictions for long enough to establish “an industry-wide system to track and charge for the reuse of their content” by online aggregators, he argued.
...is quite a bit more than simply tracking their content, it's a means to make it impossible for news sites that do not follow the subscription model to start up. Restraint of trade looks mighty attractive if it's you doing the restraining and your competition that is restrained. It isn't the newspaper industry that's being threatened with extinction so much as it is the hold of its old dinosaurs on it that's fading.
As usual, they blame the ‘economy” for their own demise. If they are so stupid NOT to look at their own bias favoring Dumocrats and the left, then these lying hypocrites deserve it 100%.
I’ve always known this recession was good for something.
Ahhhhh so true!
Newspapers gradually changed their product from news to advocacy journalism. It’s all they know, now. It’s what they were taught by their leftist college professors. Some of them are so stupid they don’t realize or recognize their own bias. They don’t understand that their product is total crap. They blame alternative media and the economy for their failure to turn a profit.
The Raleigh News and Observer lost my subscription several years ago. Can’t wait to see it fold.
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