Washington Post:
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper recalls getting "a feeling in the pit of my stomach" when he learned that the Rocky Mountain News was shutting down.
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The last time the newspaper was the first place for people to hear about a story was the 1930s.
Many of the industry's issues are out of anyone's control as new technology has made a printed newspaper delivered the morning after news has broken obsolete in many ways. But as others here have pointed out, the industry has self-destructed as well.
Giving away your product for free on the internet? Brilliant business strategy, eh? I used to bring up that issue at staff meetings at the large metropolitan paper for which I once worked, and received only shrugs. I don't have a great business mind, but I have enough common sense to realize the folly of that idea.
Chain ownership also has been a major factor, especially as it pertains to Gannett, the anti-Christ of newspapers. I worked for a Gannett paper and walked out the door without a job along with a few others last year because of our disgust with the place. They bring in editors who have made their way to the top by sucking up to superiors rather than showing any relevant skill, and then ignoring the opinions of staffers who have lived in the city for years.
It would be a great thing if a law were passed that every newspaper had to be locally owned.
The revisionism I now see are consumers belittling the idea to put the articles online for free. Yes, it was a bad idea. But when some newspapers tried to hold out or when some tried to reverse the decision years ago by adding on charges for those who wanted access, we had internet junkies claim that the future is the internet and that the newspapers would alienate readers and hurt themselves if they made people pay for online access. So basically those that want to blame the newspapers alone would have done so regardless of what the print press had done. Its a no-win scenario.
What really amazes me is how backwards American newspaper executives are. I subscribe the the UK Guardian's online edition and each day I can read an electronic copy of their paper exactly as it was printed. No American paper has followed that model yet. Their media is dying and American publishers are too dumb to see how short-sighted they are.
I worked in daily newspapers for nearly 20 years (about 15 of that a 170,000 circ daily/230,000 Sun). I'm just not surprised the business model is now blowing up.
Daily newspapers lost their way in the 1990s with a failure of imagination on the part of the editors running them. They couldn't envision the Internet as a game changer. (Throw in the rise of chain newspapers, and the editors no longer being people of the towns their papers covered.)
Yet those editors (managing or executive, seemed like we had layers of titles all over the place) routinely said circulation was dwindling, and their response was to cook up redesigns and contrived front-page features aimed at narrow demographic groups based on focus group comments.
And that's not even going into the content being sold first then given away.
To me it just seems that the folks running the dailies thought "well, the industry survived advent of radio, and TV didn't kill us off, so the Internet won't, either."
Then Web 2.0 came along, and meshed well quite a generation that had already moved on from daily newspapers and what they filled their pages with. And once again, the Big Daily was caught with its pants down, playing catch up by creating social networking Web pages and more forums and share your videos and looky at our Staff Blogs etc.
If newspapers wanted to glom onto an approach for content delivery, it should have been iTunes.
And TV news is next in line for the big sleep.
Who knew giving away your content for free wasn't a workable business model?
Craig's List has killed these guys as nobody does normal classified anymore. And as already noted the younger folks picking up news on the net.....too bad
I learned to read, years ago, reading the Chicago Daily News. I could never imagine not reading a daily paper.
Our local paper, the Burlington (VT) Free Press, a Gannett paper, has been going downhill for years, cutting and pasting (and heavily editing) national stories, filling more than half the paper with ads, cutting local reporters and stories, and all the while raising the cost of the paper. This slide began long before there were alternatives beyond the network TV news.
We finally decided to stop feeling stupid & used and gave up the paper. How many papers, like the Free Press, have lost readers not to the internet but to their own greed, increasing rates for what amounts to little more than a poorly produced newsletter?
There is something else. While the article deserves praise, it;s not often somebody form the
media is self - critical, they like to blame everybody and everything else, he forgot to mention a few minor issue concerning the media and the sub-prime crisis. An ommision most of the media people like to make.
Have a sense of humor or irony? In order to complete above critcism:
http://rinf.com/alt-news/media-news/where-was-media-when-sub-prime-disaster-unfolded/2854/
With columnists like Broder, Gerson, Krauthammer, and Will, why does the WaPo expect to have much of a readership? These guys know how to distort the news - and in a very priggish way. Frankly with George Will's column on climate change, one wonders how much of the regular "news" are distorted to fit a preconceived idea. That is WaPo's great mistake they mistake opinion for news. One sees that in Bob Woodward who seems to be an independent satrap within the empire. Is his shtick selling books or providing honest reporting (or, perhaps, news analysis)? Maybe there is a need for Truth in Advertising here. How much stocks in energy companies does Will own?
WaPo talks about mistakes? Did they include George Will?
You have liberals cheerfully waving goodbye to newspapers because they feel they have been taken over by right-wing corporations who steer them wrong. Conservatives are happy to because they cling to that old whine about newspapers having a liberal agenda. Hell, if both sides aren't happy maybe the newspapers were doing something right after all.
Of course one main problem for the business is that people are getting to read the articles for free online. And these folks don't ever want to go back and can give you 100 reasons to justify free public consumption of articles from any newspaper over the web. Its the same justifications they have for stealing music, movies, etc. Most times it typically centers around some notion that the companies producing the media has wronged the public or hasn't caught up with the present and therefore, yada, yada....But ultimately its still just a bunch of excuses.
The saddest thing is that the public can’t se the forest for the trees. Read David Simon’s column in today’s Washington Post. He nails it when he explains why blogs and other online sources can’t do the job for real investigative reporting. That’s what is being lost.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022703591.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
We'll have Al Jazeera and NPR who do actual field work. As well as other outlets.
NPR? Snort! I know many progressives who can no longer stand to listen to their political news. It's 'way too far right and, like most media, getting further right all the time.
I like their features, especially the science coverage. But as soon as they turn to some Republican politician or "think tank" person to respond to something ... a CD is only one click away.
Maybe, just maybe, the left is angry because of the repeated lies by the media and the right is mad because the media doesn't lie enough.
did Wapo mention the ignorant george will and hid global warming lies completely free from fact or expertise? probably not. Did Wapo refer to the NYTimes lying for boosh/chainey or the information they withheld from the readers for over a year about the wiretapping so boosh could be re-elected?
just asking.
You just prove my point. You have one extreme view, the other side has another. But regardless of mistakes made newspapers still remain the best watchdogs this country has. Folks on the internet, as David Simon pointed out, would never have dug up anything on the death of the 60 year old man at his home by a Baltimore police officer. Probably wouldn't have been a big enough story for the bloggers.
And spare me the outrage about what the WPost and NYTimes did or did not cover. I especially am not buying the suggestion that folks were so disgusted that they collectively stopped purchasing newspapers as a show of their moral outrage. No, folks stopped buying newspapers when the advertisers left them for the internet and when folks started getting the content of the newspapers online for free.
Next the WPost should be proud it was never like the Washington Times. The Times doesn't carry any liberal columnists because its all about its agenda. The WPost on the other hand tries to be balanced which means it will carry guys I can't stand like Novak along with left leaning columnists that I cherish. What's wrong with that?
Let me also point out that it is still the articles from those so-called useless, sell-out newspapers that are the most thought provoking and intricately written pieces that one can find on Huffingtonpost. None of the bloggers on the site provide anything closely resembling investigative journalism.
Please show me where the Washington Post has done any real investigative reporting during the Bush administration. Not a peep from them, they were too busy being stenographers for endless Republican propaganda!
If there was no real investigative journalism then why, old wise one, were liberals such as Olberman and others from time to time using articles from the WPost as a source to nail home their own criticism of te Bush administration? Must I really go back and dig up every article or column? You know its one to correctly point out that the Post and other newspapers didn't do enough. But its an entirely different animal to make a ridiculous charge that the newspaper never did any real investigating reporting at all. However I guess making an absurd claim like that is a form of self-reenforcement of your personal beliefs about the failure of the print media. Again that makes you no less delusional than a wing nut who think during the Bush years the Post was out biased against Bush and making up negative stories about him (if you have ever had the misfortune to read the posts of connservative readers on the WPost online page you'd know there are plenty of those types). Somewhere in between these two extreme versions of the WPost's coverage lies the truth.
I wonder whether any of the websites of major newspapers generate enough revenue to keep them viable as free content sources. If the major newspapers go belly up and cannot provide free content, people may not be as willing as they are now to pay for internet access. The internet could shrivel up and blow away.
People use the internet for a lot things not just newspapers.
I quit reading newspapers when I discovered they were just regurgitating Republican talking points instead of investigating them, when I saw White House reporters not asking Bush probing questions, when debunked "facts" were given a buried retraction, when I saw once-hero Bob Woodward defending Bush. My local paper's on-line version has only fluff stories on its homepage, and not-very-indepth stories buried in the site, so I quit reading that as well. It used to be a liberal paper (we also had a conservative paper which went belly-up LONG ago), but not any more. I had no idea what was REALLY going on until I started reading Daily Kos, TPM, etc. Heck, I didn't even know anyone but me was uncomfortable with the direction the country was taking! I don't need propaganda machines any more.
I feel the same way about the SF Chronicle, that while their editorials were usually good, I doubt if many readers got that far into the paper, and the "real" news was usually buried on page A-18. I doubt if most of their readers know who, for instance, Valerie Plame and Karl Rove are. There should have been stories about Rove on the front page constantly. So I have mixed feelings about their demise -- if they and the others had done their job, we wouldn't be in the mess we are in now. They just didn't realize that this whole thing was going to affect them. I hope cable news is next.
The Rocky Mountain News continued to print editorials, opinion and news slanted toward the right as if Colorado was still bright red instead of turning blue. Centerist or left of center letters to the editor seldom got printed. Could that be part of the general mistake of the publishers?
Its a problem of generations. Young people don't buy and read the newspaper. The internet has taken over, for better or worse. With the economic "downturn" many industries that rely on advertising are hurting bad. Our recovery is very important, but many newspapers may not succeed.
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Washington Post | Howard Kurtz | 03/ 1/09