The San Diego Union-Tribune, under new ownership in the last year, no longer features the old “Copley Ring of 
Truth” in the page 1 masthead. Now they have a statement along the lines of: “More than 1.374 million readers per week.”
Never mind that they used to sell more papers than that per day. But the U-T is not alone. Readers are abandoning newspapers in droves.
Below is a telling chart from The Awl.com.
Look at the incredibly swift descent of the Los Angeles Times — once considered one of the most prestigious newspapers in America (The tallness of the chart prevented me from grabbing it all — the vertical lines represent five year increments from 1990 to 2010).
I did some free-lancing for Times’ San Diego Edition around 1990. The only reason they even had a San Diego Edition, said some, was so they could say they had more than one million subscribers.
It was fun while it lasted!
“In its latest concession to the worst revenue slide since the Depression, The New York Times has begun selling display advertising on its front page, a step that has become increasingly common across the newspaper industry.”
– The New York Times, Jan. 5, 2009
It’s a sign of the times, pardon the pun.
There was a day, not so very long ago, when a virtual firewall separated the advertising and editorial functions of every self-respecting newspaper.
It was understood that editorial space (aka, “the news hole”) was not for sale, ever – that even if you were CBS, Ford, or the Coldwell Banker Broker of the Month, you could not insert yourself onto the front page. That space was reserved for what the editors judged to be the most urgent matters requiring the attention of the community on that particular day.
No part of that space was available to the highest bidder. Not even the bottom inch of the page.
Times change, of course (ha ha!)
While you still can. Colorado’s oldest newspaper, The Rocky Mountain News, has lost $11 million in the first nine months of this year and might be shuttered as soon as next month, reports KUSA TV and the Associated Press.
Should this major metropolitan newspaper hit the dead pool it surely won’t be the last to do so. The economics of newspaper publishing are difficult enough already, and as advertising dollars dry up, big newspapers will go further in the hole.
Google can deliver advertising more precisely targeted to whatever micro-niche a business is trying to reach, without having to bear the huge infrastructure costs of daily publishing and distribution.
To survive, newspapers will need to leverage the newsgathering capabilities they have, as well as the brand equity they still enjoy. They will need to get very good at capturing stories with handheld videocameras, and breaking those stories down into bite-sized chunks.
The quaint morning ritual of picking up a newspaper has not even sentimental value to the iPod generation. Viva the RSS feed!
The first time I saw The Christian Science Monitor, I expected it to be chock full of wing-nut proselytizing, like, say, The Watchtower, that curious piece of rubbish the Jehovah’s Witnesses leave behind after you shoo them off your front porch.
What a pleasant shock it was, back in the day, to discover that this little broadsheet was a respectable, serious newspaper that publishes insightful exposes and often breaks major national stories. And they even had reading rooms, where you could wander in off the street, sit down in a quiet place and read the paper (or the religious books they provided) — how cool is that?
Yesterday the CSM announced that after 100 years, it will stop producing its newsprint edition and publish only on the Web. It finally makes too much sense economically and environmentally not to do that, and it’s only a matter of time before other national publications follow suit.
Politics is a parade of lies and maybe it always has been. Yet this year the lies seem even more brazen than we’ve ever seen.
It’s almost as if one of the candidates doesn’t realize that there’s a record now of everything he says. It includes video and transcripts, and people getting online to talk to each other about what he’s said.
This didn’t happen in elections 20 years ago. Prospective voters are talking to their friends, whom they trust, and spending less time watching the ordained pundits who are supposed to be making sense of the parade of lies.
“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either.”
– Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times
Could anyone have imagined him saying that just a few years ago? More here.
Salon has a long but great essay by Gary Kamiya on how “massive online feedback has rocked writers and changed journalism forever.”
It reminded me of when I was a reporter at the La Jolla Light and and I referred to Kate Sessions (who lived about 100 years ago and planted much of the foliage around Balboa Park) as a “spinster†in a story about her (unwedded) life. This characterization so enraged one reader (presumably single and with no good prospects) that she cancelled her subscription.