Ever since the Huffington Post launched, three years ago in a few weeks, May 9th to be precise if you wish to send Arianna flowers, we have seen the continued strength and rise of online media, and the continued free fall of newspaper circulation.
Every six months, the large city newspapers are reporting circulation declines of 3% to 8% and the cumulative effect of those declines is stark, and foretells the coming end of the newspaper era.
It is my opinion that substantial fixed costs, newspaper plants, delivery trucks, combined with rising energy costs, and lower consumer spending, meaning less advertising will all transpire to cause the closing of at least one major newspaper in the next six to nine months, potentially more.
Look at the tale of three major city dailies:
12. San Francisco Chronicle, 370,345, down 4.2 percent13. Dallas Morning News, 368,313, down 10.6 percent
14. Boston Globe, 350,605, down 8.3 percent
These are six-month numbers which look very much like the last six-month numbers and the ones before that are pretty much identical as well.
In the face of these dramatic declines, a few more issues become stark realities. The first is the relationship between these city newspapers and the communities they serve.
The New York Times, for example, with total circulation of just over a million people, and not all of those are in New York City, many are in the greater New England area, Washington, even Florida and California. How well does it now represent a city of 9 million and a metroplex of, some estimate, 12 million people?
The Boston Globe, which even just 24 months ago, was over 500,000 circulation, now has dropped all the way to 350,000 readers. The 2 million people in the Boston area are not reading using the Globe like they were a decade ago.
It also becomes hard to see how The Globe survives the next year; with enormous fixed costs, a huge workforce, many with union contracts, a large printing press, some very expensive journalists and a fleet of delivery trucks. They should have dropped their advertising rates by 25% over the past two years, but instead they have been raising rates, rapidly, to cover the declining revenue, it is a recipe for death, not success.
There is nothing short of a dramatic re-invention that will prevent the numbers six months from now showing significant declines and six months after that. I have often thought that if I was a newspaper person, I would be looking a large dominant weekly, and forego the daily paper.
When you combine those realities with the reality of a decline in consumer spending, which will equal a decline in advertising spend by retailers, you see the writing is on the wall.
Smart companies will realize they deliver news, not newspapers and continue to transition online. But growth online has greatly reduced CPMs, it is a different business, some will survive, many will not, but either way, six months from now, one of the newspapers who reported another dramatic decline in readers today, might not be around to share their bad news.
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There are a few of us sane souls, who refuse to read the daily swill, who refuse to buy the endless propaganda, who refuse to be told what the news is, what the truth is, by people who have no idea what either are.
Instead of an alarmist article, shouldn't you be looking at this as a good thing, Mr. Boyce? The pendulum is swinging back--toward reality, toward the truth.
Because it had become a worthless rag.
Newspaper, it is still paper but is bereft of news. Reports of traffic accidents and budget meetings at the state capital. Local woman wins bakeoff and furniture store celebrates 100 years in business. In my own local paper the most popular column is one where they allow readers to post comments. Far more entertaining, as well as informative with real opinions from real people! While the paid editorial staff moo in unison to the publisher’s political agenda.
As the papers devour each other they seek to cut costs by cutting back on content. This makes about as much sense as trying to keep an air raft afloat by slowly letting out the air. The newspaper industry lives by the dinosaur principle, the bigger they get the dumber they get. Believing that, “We’re the newspaper they have to buy us! How will they know what movies are playing? Or read the classifieds?” Not that newspapers can’t compete, but that they don’t try to compete!
Used car classified ad in my local paper, $150.00 Same ad Craig’s list ,$0 Yet the newspapers have a vehicle that I can hold in my hand and read at my leisure, but only if I want to!
2) the Boston Globe is being strangled in its crib by its negligent (and incompetent) parent, the New York Times. As a reader, the rising rates don't concern me. The reason I don't read it is the appalling lack of quality content and talent, as their best writers have been shown the door. Though there is some talent left (Ellen Goodman, Joan Venocchi) the real story is replacing the insight and wit of a Thomas Oliphant with a hack like Jeff Jacoby. There is nothing about my town (I'm lumped in with an ever expanding local region known as 'Globe North,' wherever that is. All the Globe has is its sports page. The Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics are life support for this comatose news organization.
This paper stopped being worth what you paid for it when it was still $.035 a copy. Now it's half as good, and they want you to pay twice as much.
Now consider newspapers defining themselves, 10 years ago, as 'information providers' rather than 'newspapers'.
However, there’s a more important “big picture” factor. Newspapers are failing to meet the needs of readers, by failing utterly to fulfill their role in the democratic process. (The same applies to audience declines in other mainstream media formats). Despite periodic excellent reporting, the MSM is most often characterized by all the things that they DON’T report.
There has been a steady erosion of the once impregnable wall between the editorial side of the organizations and the revenue/advertising side. Financial pressures and a weakening integrity on the part of upper management have allowed purely financial considerations to exert an ever greater influence on content.
Add to this the consolidation in the business and you have an ever more fragmented audience, but an ever more monolithic ownership of the various platforms that deliver content to that audience. The result: the mainstream media has been picking up speed along its path to irrelevance for years. People are increasingly aware that they are very poorly served by the mainstream media, so they’re taking their eyeballs elsewhere. You’re reading one of the places they’re going right now.
The ironic fact is, if you focus so much on revenue that you’re willing to corrupt your content (I.e., news), you kill the very thing that attracts an audience. And without the audience, you can’t generate any revenue.
It is a product worthy of a populace which is predominantly illiterate and smugly self-satisfied.