New Jersey’ biggest newspaper will cease printing in February and become online only. Not included in the article is the fact that the entire editorial board is being let go. Online or not, it will cease to function as a newspaper and turn into something else. Although there have been various name changes and acquisitions the paper has been in existence in one form or another since 1832.
It was the only newspaper that had statewide reach. For a state that is covered mostly by the media of two other states it was important.
The real story is it’s been barely on life support for years. In a relatively short period of time it went from having several huge printing facilities around the state to having one. It’s writing staff has been whittled down to a skeleton crew. It’s become obvious that very little reporting was being done. Almost all crime reporting was taken directly from press releases. Their periodic exposés became variants on “Look how much money this state worker makes.” In other words things one guy can write using open source information on their computer. Now even that is gone.
Unfortunately this is how things will be going. Things change. I get that. But it seems to me that a lot of bad things will fester when there is no professional reporting at the local level, only people complaining on Nextdoor or Facebook.
I have read that this is the largest newspaper in the country that has decided to go electronic only. So far.
Exactly. It’s already gone more to clickbait articles like “We list the best pizza” than real news. It’s basically impossible to know what’s going on in the legislature because there is no reporting. It’s going to get worse.
When I started working at the police department reporters would come in at least once a week to read the reports that were public record. The public knew what was going on around them. Now the open public records laws are even stronger but there is no one there to look and report on those records.
My friend who retired from the NYT sent me a message about this. He got his first byline with that Jersey paper many years ago. I’m waiting for the MN paper to go the same way. The paper quality is like cheap toilet paper, the comics section is awful, and the Alaska Daily News has more relevant current events. Unlike me, my wife is a big proponent of newsprint. While I hate clickbait, I like being able to scan articles quickly online.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch still prints, but it just announced it would job its printing out to a plant 100 miles away. Because of the earlier deadlines, the print version of the paper will no longer be able to carry the evening sports scores or any news that happens after about 6:00 p.m. They may as well start calling themselves a yesterday afternoon paper.
What. A. Shame. That was the newspaper of my childhood. FTR, the term “beg-a-thon” to mean a PBS or other station’s telethon: “Please call in and donate money to keep us on the air!” was coined by Jerry Krupnick, the Star-Ledger entertainment editor or whatever he was. Krupnick passed on a few years ago, so at least he doesn’t see this.
It’s the same all over the [free] world; local newspapers are dying, those that remain just generate clickbait or recycle press releases. Routine court reporting has ceased, one central news agency takes down the copy and tries hawking it around the media in the hopes that someone will pay to take it. Advertising, which was their lifeblood, all moved to the internet.
RIP, the local newspaper. Very sad, but it is impossible to see it continuing. Loss of ads is the reason. Remember classifieds? They were very profitable, but they have entirely disappeared save for obits.
Here’s an old memory. Pardon my hijack. One day, my father and I went to a ball game at the old Shibe Park in Philly. When the game ended, we took a trolley to the Broad St. Subway, just 7 blocks. Changed to subway to market St. maybe 7 or 8 stops. Changed to the market St. subway/elevated to 56th St. Came down the stairs to catch the G bus home. At the bottom of the steps was a kid hawking the Daily News that already had the final score (although no actual story) of the game we had left less than an hour ago! The Daily News is long gone, but they published new editions all day long.
This is what’s been happening to my old local newspaper: the Green Bay Press-Gazette. First, they moved printing to Appleton (30 minutes away), and now to Milwaukee (100 miles away), where it’s one of several papers which are printed at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel presses there. As a result, the Press-Gazette puts its daily editions to bed at 3pm the afternoon before, meaning that no timely news (particularly no sports results) will be in the next day’s paper.
Even worse, any coverage of a Sunday’s Packer game – which is one of the biggest local stories – won’t even appear in the paper until Tuesday, at which point, it’s old news, and the Press-Gazette figures that, by then, people will have read about it online, so they don’t even bother much.
The local newsroom has very little in the way of staff at this point, and the vast majority of the paper’s content is from their sister paper in Milwaukee, the AP, or Gannett corporate.
The print edition (which my parents, age 90 and 84, still like to read) is now thin, and close to worthless.
I was disappointed to learn this weekend before last, when I visited family in New Jersey. After the New Brunswick Home News died, this was the only large regional paper left, and I’m sad to see it go.
Well, we’ve still got the Asbury Park Press and the Trenton Times. And a couple of papers based further away.
Now we’ll only have the New York and Philadelphia papers, and slim things that are basically advertising fliers.
The APP hasn’t been a real newspaper since shortly after Gannett bought them out over 20 years ago. That was my paper through about 2002. It went from Award Winning to mostly garbage well ahead of the Internet destroying Newspapers.
This is the worst part. We’re drowning in information from multiple sources but there are no longer any generally accepted professional standards regarding how that information should be verified and presented to the public.
A big reason for the loss of classified ad revenue was Craigslist. I don’t think it’s as big a thing today, but perhaps twenty years ago, it was a free alternative to a paid classified ad in the newspaper. Prior to that, any newspaper, even a prestigious one like the New York Times, would have pages and pages of classified ads, for employment, real estate, tag sales and such.
The problem is more the overall smaller pie - when people stop reading newspapers you can’t charge as much for ads so selling the same number of them doesn’t matter. There’s a psychology of paying $3 a day or $40 a month for a print newspaper that people are unwilling to do for a website. You can’t charge as much and 90% of people will simply refuse on principle to “pay for news” even if they are retirees who paid for paper news for the past 60 years, and go to the free sites instead.
Also little-discussed is how the newspaper industry underwent a huge boom in the 1990s. After the wave of consolidations and the death of afternoon papers completed in the early 80s, newspapers actually defied every expectation during the original growth of the Internet and strident competition from new cable news networks and added 50% to their revenue from 1990 to 2000. A correction was inevitable and it came at the same time as the impact of the online news consumer finally was felt.