Did not find anything mentioned on this on the SDMB. New Orleans will be one of the first major US cities without a newspaper that is printed daily. The New York Times reported on May 25, 2012, that The Times-Picayune will print on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. It was also reported that The Birmingham News, The Press-Register, and The Huntsville Times will follow suit.
That is what The New York Times wrote on how *The Times-Picayune *reported on Hurricane Katrina.
This link provides the answer to how The Times-Picayune will publish on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. In fact, one day, perhaps, The Times-Picayune will be digital-only. I just hope that they have a good backup system. In the meantime, this development brings out the issue of the “digital divide” (especially in cities like New Orleans) to the fore.
It’s a sad reality, but an unavoidable one. I doubt if even a majority of Dopers subscribe to a daily physical paper anymore. I know I would if I still had a two hour commute by train, but since I don’t, papers would pile up unread.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad development. Having The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or The Times-Picayune printed and delivered takes time. Sometimes today’s paper is uploaded at 4 AM which allows me to scan the headlines early in the day. The lead story today was about the massacre in Syria. Romney said something. :rolleyes:
It would be a great selling point for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and The Times-Picayune and other newspapers to say ‘get the newspaper delivered to your IPad at 4 AM’.
Not everyone in New Orleans can afford an IPad, though. I’ll see next year what The Times-Picayune does.
I have no sympathy for the newspaper owners. they screwed up, just like the record companies and the big-box retailers.
Everywhere I go, there’s an “alternative” weekly. FOR FREE. From what I’ve read here, newspapers charge an exorbitant amount for classified and obituaries. Free papers get by entirely on their advertisements.
The owners of the Times-Picayune also publish the Cleveland Plains Dealer and The Newark star Ledger. Their magazine division (Conde Nast) owns The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired. How many multi-millions are the guys in those NYC offices pulling in each year? As they shut down the Times-Picayune, how many millions did they allot themselves for bonuses last year?
So New Orleans will be without a daily paper that had a long history in the city. Some residents will suffer, but most will just turn to their TV sets and those with pocket money will use their tablets. If restrictions on media ownership had not been lifted, newspapers could have survived. Owners sold out to conglomerates so that they could pad their retirement money as their employees were replaced by faceless people in the head office a thousand miles away. Greed is responsible for the demise of the daily paper, and the regional TV news will fall next. There’s no reason for the conglomerates to pay for local news when they can farm out the job to Google.
Newspapers are dependent entirely on advertising. Newsstand sales and home delivery barely pay for the paper to be printed on with nothing left over for what makes a newspaper a newspaper. Print advertising of all kinds, except for luxury goods, has been declining steadily for years.
Online newspapers are next to worthless for the traditional full-page department store and car ads that were a newspaper’s bread and butter. They’ve already lost the huge supermarket ads except for Sunday inserts. There is literally nothing they could have done about it. No newspaper in the country has a trick for keeping advertisers. The size of the rest of the paper, called the news-hole, is dependent on the amount of ads that are being run. News is filler to put around the ads so that people give themselves an excuse to flip through the pages. All newspapers in this country are losing pages, most by huge percentages.
The same is true elsewhere. Rupert Murdoch’s troubles in England are especially troubling to his board and stockholders because the newspapers are his pet project but can’t be justified by the money they make (or lose). For years they’ve been trying to get him to dump the newspaper side of the business entirely and concentrate on the moneymaking divisions.
Newspapers in this country, where there are no true national papers, exist because people like to see their names and activities and schools and organizations in the paper. Localness still sells. When all the local papers go under, exactly where will Google be getting its stories from? Local bloggers? And who is going to advertise with them? Free weeklies are not the alternative. And they ain’t doing so hot themselves.
Have newspapers made mistakes and been slow to recognize the magnitude of this change? Obviously. Nobody has ever figured out what they could have done about it, though. If there isn’t a viable solution, then accusations of blame are hollow.
As a journalist, I’ve gotten fairly used to the daily delivery of bad news regarding the health of my industry. But hearing about what the Times-Picayune is planning to do was really quite a stunner. It certainly makes me wonder if it’s finally time for me to give this up and figure out something else to do with my life.
Yes. This. I still subscribe to a daily newspaper, which probably puts me in the minority on this message board. And the reason is strictly because of the local news. Everyone knows that national and international news is easier and faster to come by on the Internet. But I haven’t found a substitue for the newspaper to give me the coverage of local issues. And even there, I wish it would do more.
So The Washington Post is the only “national” newspaper that is not widely printed and distributed. Everyone reads it in Washington D.C. and The Washington Post matters as much as *The Wall Street Journal * to many people across the country, even though, as mentioned, it is not widely printed and distrubted.
The newspaper companies - Gannett, Tribune, Advance Publications - could sell newspapers packages – PDF editions of the printed editions with hyperlinks to A3, B6, C7, ect., hyperlinks in the text to previous articles, sources, multimedia, all the bells and whistles that people will pay for.
Those newspaper companies need to do something. Otherwise they will lose out to The New York Times, the local TV news, and other news sources.
The Washington Post used to have national bureaus but it gave them up as too expensive. It used to have aspirations to become a national newspaper. It failed and it’s cut back enormously over the past few years since Katharine Weymouth became publisher. It.
Most of the profits of the corporation come from the educational service Kaplan, Inc..
The Post is not an example of how to do newspapers right. I’d argue just the opposite. It’s the most important paper for politics in the country. It serves a company town that is highly literate, with the highest percentage of college graduates, and several of the counties with the highest median income in the nation. It’s had a near local monopoly since 1964, with only the oddball Washington Times as a true competitive newspaper. And with all that going for it circulation has decreased nearly 40%, layoffs are common, specialty political news sources are killing its one remaining expertise, and it’s being subsidized by a firm that does SAT prep classes.
What you should be saying is: since the Washington Post is failing so conspicuously, then no other newspaper has a chance.
I only used The Washington Post as an example because of Watergate. A better example would be The Atlanta Journal-Constitution which is a merger between The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constutution. It is owned by Cox Enterprises. A subsidiary is Cox Communications which, for those who are unfamiliar (or out of the area), is basically Comcast.
Which brings me to my point: Newspapers might have a better chance being under media companies like Cox Enterprises or Comcast.
That said, however; The Wall Street Journal is under News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch. So my point is inherently contentious and I find myself debating it.
All things considered, though, some people do get their news from The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times.
There might be a chance for other newspapers like the Detroit Free Press, which is under Gannett, if they are sold as newspaper packages. For example, Gannett could say “Subscribe to the Detroit Free Press for $_(reasonable) amount__.00 per month and get USA Today and your choice of ten other Gannett owned newsapers.” The *Detroit Free Press *already has an E-Edition. Get E-Editions for all the other newspapers, sell them in packages and then they’ll be back in business.
Besides, having one E-Editon of the paper, say, the Detroit Free Press, delivered to your IPad is just as easy as having ten papers delivered to your IPad.
Let me rephrase it then. Why would I want to pay a premium for ten other local papers?
Subscription money never paid for any newspapers. Advertising money did. That was a nice combination of classified ads and display ads. Neither one work well online. And neither one work at all for a non-local audience. Packaging ten local papers into a subscription either requires a premium price, which non-locals have no incentive to pay, or increased advertising, which local advertisers have no incentive to pay just to put their ads before non-local audiences.
I just don’t see why bundling other newspapers would be a good business model rather than unwanted clutter. Bundling itself may work as an incentive, but the prize has to be something that is wanted. I don’t know what that is. Maybe special Groupon coupons. Or free HBO. Or the ability to subscribe to comic strips that aren’t published locally. But the point about local newspapers is that they serve a local audience. You can’t make money by giving Austin to Boston.
Seems to me you don’t have to change what you do as much as how you do it, or really how we get it. I think the pressmen and delivery drivers will have a rougher transition.
For the purposes of this thread, today I read the Detroit Free Press. I don’t usually read the Detroit Free Press. It costs $1.00 at newsstands and the E-Edition, while considerably cheaper than in print, is not a good bargain for one newspaper. Still, I got a copy from the newsstand today for a dollar and read it.
In the Detroit Free Press, June 4, 2012, there are three headlines on the front page. One of them is about anti-bullying, an issue about which I am interested in. I read the article. It’s about how schools in Michigan are following Matt’s Safe School Law. The article gives statistics for bullying in Michigan and gives the example of an autistic eight-grader who was being cyber-bullied and how the school responded. In addition to the article, there is a sidebar which explains Matt’s Safe School Law, how to take action, getting help with bullying, and identifying the different kinds of bullying. In Metro, an article about fish flies (summer’s here!). On the Opinion page, an editorial about U.S. jobs, and letters. Then the Sports section. Then the Life section. The last page: Comics.
Fish flies is local color.
The editorial which goes into how the Michigan Legislature should put this year’s extra money into fixing roads instead of giving taxpayers a $1 a week tax cut also mentioned water mains bursting. Someone outside of Michigan, reading the editorial would understand that Michigan’s infrastructure is in need of repair.
Anti-bullying is a national issue. Someone browsing the front pages of the newspapers that they subscribe to would notice that headline and read the article.
And advertising will work online, or, rather, in the E-Editions. Advertising will work for a non-local audience because, while the articles, editorials, and letters will be non-local, the advertisements can and will be local. They can customize the advertisements in the E-Editions delivered to subscribers. So someone in Chicago will see different advertisements than someone in Orlando.
They can start by saying “When you subscribe to the *Detroit Free Press *E-Editon, you will get the USA Today E-Edition. Two newspapers for one low price!”
It won’t be a premium price for newspaper packages.
Also, there is no such thing anymore as a local audience.
