There’s been a lot of talk lately about the trouble the newspaper business is in. My question is, how long will it take for print dailies vanish from most major cities?
There will always be some daily newspapers. I don’t forsee the Wall Street Journal or even USA Today disappearing anytime soon. (Caveat: five years ago I would have said the same thing about the Christian Science Monitor.
But in 20 years or so, the current metropolitan daily newspaper will either be reinvented or completely trashed (depending on your perspective.) I think newspapers will attempt to regionalize, and at the same time, reduce “reporting” to short snippets of information from a broader geographic area. At the same time, smaller daily newspapers will collapse, so that, for example, the Dallas Morning News ends up printing a whole bunch of items from all over north Texas, western Arkansas and southern Oklahoma, bolstered by an increasingly heavy dose of lifestyle and service features that aren’t necessarily connected to its home city.
First off, let me direct the OP to a thread I threw up a few weeks back about the fiscal solvency of free weeklies and the following Slate article that I found illuminating.
Both the Dope thread and the Slate piece mention one important fact I think is too often left aside, especially by journalists kvetching about their imminent demise: namely, that newspapers can and, in some cases, are still profitable. The issue with many papers is that they were purchased with debt or that the companies who own them are hemorrhaging elsewhere. Point being: the slow downfall of the newspaper isn’t necessarily the fault of Old Man Internet; bad business practices are equally (if not more) to blame.
I see a few dailies surviving—the LA & NY Times, USA Today, WSJ—and staying national. Other papers, I’ll suggest, should take a cue from free weeklies: focus locally, on both ads and content, cover stories uniquely, continue to foster quality columnists and commentators. It’s probably best to drop coverage of local pro sports teams for some papers, as a lot of those writers don’t use their access to get us much more than what you’d get watching the games and reading a few diligent blogs. Take all national news from AP or other wire services. Ditch foreign bureaus unless you’re one of the four abovementioned papers.
The big problem seems to me that no paper is doing much beyond cutting costs a little at a time when wholesale changes need to be made now. If I knew exactly what those changes were though, I’d probably have a fancier job. Laying off a reporter now and again does not seem to be making much difference.
ETA: And, to answer the OP: my guess is we’ll see serious closures over the next two years or so, with the papers that remain after that around for the long(ish) haul
You are so right. Like AM radio, it has to change. AM became the home to specialty types of radio, like foreign language, sports, news and talk shows.
Newspapers CAN survive but not doing what they are doing now. They need to find a niche and downsize into that niche then they can prosper.
Actually, I wouldn’t bet on either American Times surviving. They are both hemmoraging readership.
Still, you are right about the problems. I think the solution lies elsewhere. Papers have historically been slowly buying each other and folding up for a long time, and they are among the most competition-hating businesses around. They just hate it. There’s usually just one per city, and that has not worked out well. The heyday of newspapers was in the days when they were a lot smaller, cheaper, and more widely available.
One slight point of disagreement: I don’t think it’s primaruly the business managers who are responsible. They haven’t always made wise choices, but no worse than elsewhere. The editors, however, have traditionally been about the least savvy individuals around, and are chosen for reasons and skills that have little to do with their actual responsibilities. The old editor was half reporter and half entrepreneur; today we primarily have overgrown “journalists” who turned into editorialists and whose politics agreed with the rest of the staff.
The Detroit Free Press is going on line. They have a site that allows you to turn a page visually. I do not know how well it will work, it has only been on line about 2 weeks. They are home delivering a paper Wed,Fri and Sunday. I suspect that will stop after a while.
How many readers will they lose due to no home computer ? Have they cut their audience significantly?
How come weekly news magazines aren’t disappearing the same way newspapers are?
How many weekly news magazines were there in the first place?
And to answer your question, U.S. News and World Report is converting from a weekly to a biweekly and could go monthly soon. Newsweek is taking steps to refocus its content to a narrower audience and cut circulation, and Time managed to hold readership steady until 2007, when it began to hemorrhage. They let a lot of jobs go that year as well, and dropped the Canadian edition in 2008.
So it isn’t cheerful happy news there either - in fact it looks worse.
What is a newspaper? An aggregation service that knows where it’s published and where it’s likely to be read, down to a hundred-mile radius. Therefore, the obvious thing to do is for them to become purely local media and drop all of the wire reports and syndicated junk. We can get all of that location-insensitive news a lot faster and a lot better on the Internet.
So, have any newspapers gone this route to our knowledge? It seems so obvious to me, but I’m not in the business.
The San Jose Mercury News is evolving in that direction. Long ago they announced that they were going to emphasize local stories even if that meant important national stories would be pushed to inside pages. Their rationale was exactly what we’ve all been saying – those stories are the ones we can all read on the Internet anyway.
The net affect is that nowadays, the prominent stories on the front page of this paper are almost always very local stories.
Regretfully, this has not stopped the decline of readership.
Ed
Until the last Baby Boomer dies.
This is probably the expected lifespan of TV and talk radio as we know them, as well.
suranyi: Damn. I guess that puts a little wrench in my theory.
My reason? Young people have abandoned them, and advertising is cheaper and more effective, using ON-Line services. The thing I don’t understand: why do they provide their online versions for free? I have been reading the NY Times, Boston Globe, Boston Herald online, for free. Why would In pay for a paper edition? And then, you have the problem of baling your used newspapers, and keeping them dry so ou can throw them out.
At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, it’s because digital media changes everything. In general, people refuse to pay for something online if they can get it for free. If you could only view the NYT online by paying, then many people would simply go to Yahoo News, Slate, HuffPo, or some other online news aggregate. By opening up their website to non-subscribers, the NYT attracts a much larger reader-base. Readers who will potentially click on advertising.
Hooray! British newspapers are on the way down too
More gloom for UK newspapers
The Sun falls below the 3m mark
Not that they’re all bad, of course. But the average newspaper in this country, especially when you factor in the much higher sales of the tabloids, print absolute garbage. Particularly w.r.t. science news
I can tolerate throwing the baby out to purge this ocean of bath water.
I think over half of them will be gone in less than ten years. The survivors that stay won’t be relying on their paper circulation to keep them afloat. They will also have to diversify and do considerably more than just run a daily newspaper, which those that are managing to still make a profit are already doing. Circulation numbers are down considerably for all newspapers that I’m aware of. Quite a few are not making a profit anymore, the ones that are, are relying on mostly antiquated presses, that would cost a millions to replace, but it’s not practical to do so when the internet news is taking more and more of their business. It’s a slow death.
One example: I used to work at the newspaper in my hometown some 20 years ago. At the time it had a circulation of 52,000 on Sundays. Now it’s 32,000. They put in a new state of the art press about 25 years ago, but now it is considered archaic. My brother still runs the press, and has the responsibility of keeping it going, but it’s often a challenge to keep it running when there are not parts to be found for it anymore. Somehow this particualr paper is still managing a profit, but many in their chain are not. Recently they had another round of lay offs, along with asking others to retire early. Those that stayed, all had to take a 3% cut in pay. The company is also no longer contributing to their 401K, and also cutting their other benefits. It’s not a business I would want to be in right now.
Newspapers need to stop competing with the Internet.
There needs to be online content, and there need to be print content.
Online news is fast, up-to-the-minute coverage of stuff happening right now! Print news can be longer, more heavily researched, focused features-- stuff that people don’t always like reading at a computer.
Problem solved.
But your subscription payment for a print newspaper only pays for a fraction of the cost of producing that newspaper. Most newspaper revenue is from ads–both commercial and classified–not subscriptions or box or newsstand sales. Just like you don’t pay a dime to watch Katie Couric on CBS news, you pay only a dime for your pile of newsprint, without ads you’d pay much more.
And revenue from classified ads has plummeted due to the internet. And nobody is making big bucks from internet classified ads either, Craigslist is a very small operation, and various freecycle lists don’t make money either. And this is because classified ads are very easy to do over the internet. If Craigslist tried to charge people for placing or answering classified ads, people would just go somewhere else where they can do it for free.
And so one of the engines that subsidized the news is gone. And it will never ever come back. The revenue that used to be taken by the newspapers is now returned to the users, and it’s going to be that way forever. No one will ever make big bucks from classified ads ever again.
And then you have advertising. And online advertising doesn’t seem to work as well as print, TV or radio ads. Maybe that’s because we’re using different metrics. But advertisers aren’t willing to pay very much to post online ads. Which means that websites don’t get much money from ads.
So newspapers are losing subscription revenue, since people can get news for free from other sources, they are losing classified ad revenue, and they are losing commercial ad revenue. And say goodbye to conventional newspapers.