Slashdot Mirror
Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets."
I clicked over to the Washington Post to read the story, and there were no ads there.
washington post
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
It's the way the world works. When the telephone came around did telegraph operators keep their business methods - or did they evolve to use the new technology?
In other news, water is wet.
The last Buggy-Whip manufacturer was heard gloating with his buddy the Spittoon manufacturer about how they had 100% market share in their respected fields.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I am trying to figure out what the heck that means. In this context, does it match any of these definitions?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I remember hearing that you should get two papers: The NY Times and a local paper.
It looks like less and less people care about the first one.
I live in the bay area and the only big newspaper around here is the Mercury News.
Without trying to start a flame war, it's much easier finding an unbaised article online.
I wonder how this trend compares with non-internet related events, such as:
... it's nearly 1 day old
I'm skeptical that there's an actual decline happening. There was nothing about this on Drudge.
Along with my investments in Trans-Atlantic Zeppelins and Amalgamated Spats, my newspaper stocks are worthless!
I'm not sure I see this as a good thing. There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story. I just can't see the internet producing people like Bernstein and Woodward, Nancy Maynard, Anna Quindlen and others like them.
At least there are some robust areas in the declining newspaper market.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
My best guess is news outlets that have deep links and high tech will win out. My best back of the envelope strategy would be to embed news stories in elective layers of deepening context. Readers would be able to elect to go ever deeper into a news story and link to information nodes that would shed light on how news events impact their neighbourhood, income level, etc. You should be able to enter a news story at a world wide level and exit at the neighbourhood mall. The problem would be how to allow for in depth news reporting without the content being lost in a jungle of links. National news outlets have the ability to provide just such coverage. The News_paper_ is dead, news reporting has morphed and the readership has morphed to meet the new coverage. The message is still strong, it's the medium that needs to change.
ideopath @ play
His talk was on hyperlocality, ie covering things in your back yard (well, not literally, although if he could help this winter... err, wait). Shortly after this, WaPo launched a section on Loudon County (a suburb VA county outside of DC). It was a flop.
It would be odd to see the newspaper disappear altogether. What will we roll up and shake at our dogs? What will spies hide behind? What will we line cages with?
Why do I care, that some anonymous person five states over was murdered?
If it's of national import, it's going to be all over the web and television anyway.
Newspapers should give very deep news on local issues, sports, local editorials, etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's all been downhill since we gave up the clay tablet for paper...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Every time I see a story like this I ask the same question to myself, and have yet to hear an appropriate answer.
Why can a newspapers and magazines charge 100 times more for an ad on ink, that reaches a tiny fraction of the people that an online ad reaches? The economics of it make no sense to me. Is there some research that shows people are more likely yo pay attention to print ads than online ads? Because I have never paid attention to a print ad in my life.
Why don't newspaper websites (which are very popular) just charge more for online ads, comperable rates to what they charge for print ads?
What happens when the newspapers and magazines have such low subscribership that they can't justify their high ad prices anymore - will then THEN feel justified to charge more for their online ads?
I don't really intend this to be politically controversial, though that is probably inevitable. Of course newspapers have been challenged by the Internet, but this is not the first competition they've had. TV has been competing with newspapers for decades and they survived just fine. It isn't that newspapers have lost a competitive edge; they've lost a monopoloistic edge. It used to be they were the only game in town. A rare city had two newspapers. If you wanted to sell your car or post a job, the Classifieds was your only choice. Ever tried to sell a car through the Classifieds lately? Yowzaa! $100 easy just for an ad too tiny to read! But put it on cars.com for $24.95 with a bunch of pictures, and whaddya know, it sells. Happened to me anyway two years ago.
The second issue is that newspapers once stood for something. They were either avowedly and unabashedly partisan in their outlook, or they proclaimed journalistic objectivity. I think that no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Internet has allowed you to broaden your horizons, and THAT has lead to a realization that 'journalistic objectivity' is an oxymoron. It's not so much that newspapers lean one direction or another--though my local one never seems to like a Republican candidate, even for innocuous posts, but that you can see "sins of ommission." The real power of a newspaper is in what they choose to publish. They get a tremendous amount of information 'over the wire' and then they choose which stories to print, ignoring the stories they don't wish to print.
When you suddenly have the Net and a tremendous number of news sources to choose from, you can see this. You can see what the newspapers have been leaving out, so the newspaper becomes less relevant to your 'news needs' and you drop it. I dropped my paper because they couldn't seem to get it in the box. After continual complaints of poor service I finally decided I really didn't need it. I don't miss it.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
First problem is that most newspapers are useless except for very local news. It used to be that you actually needed to subscribe to the local newspaper to know what was going on. With the web (blogs and the like)...that's simply not the case anymore. Which means that (at least for me) there are very few newspapers that actually provide anything of value...and that's primarily the investigative reporting. Sadly, this also seems to be one of the things that is being eliminated first.
The newspapers' only chance to survive is to differentiate themselves from the cable networks and actually write their own interesting articles, rather than just use articles from Reuters/AP. They should also adapt to the growing number of smartphones and realize that this is the delivery method of choice going forward. If they offer a low price ($10-20/month?) service and restrict free articles to one or two per day per person, they can open a new revenue source, and I think many people would have no problems paying for this for good newspapers (the NY Times comes to mind), especially if they were able to get articles delivered in a good format for smartphones.
Haha come on. I thought it was funny!
In fact.. yay, a graph:
http://www.theawl.com/2009/10/a-graphic-history-of-newspaper-circulation-over-the-last-two-decades
( via Cool Infographics blog )
The LA Times has just been sucking overall, explaining their sharp drop.
Most of the others had been stable until relatively recently, as more and more people realize that they all just regurgitate the same news they can get online for free.
The exception noted in the article summary - the local publishers - and the major publisher lonely at the top and holding relatively steady, share the opposite of the above in common. They don't regurgitate news so much as that they report on the actual news and provided added value. In the case of local newspapers.. local news that strikes at the heart of the community (I've always wanted to say that). In the case of the WSJ.. in-depth investigation and background information, catering to their major audience (which tend not to be the target audience for the other major papers).
Quite trying to recapture the good ole days and look forward. You can make money, you can exist you just need to realize you are 1 part of a larger media expectation.
I would be happy to talk to you about it, my consultation fee is 250 per hour.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...of hordes of ./ readers taking time out from flaming one another and bitching about the poor quality of editor control on the site and the dubious submissions which make it through to the front page to sanctimoniously celebrate the death of "old" media.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal? Do they even have the resources? Would they have survived the commercial and political pressure resulting from pursuing the story (the Post nearly didn't)?
Newspapers have failed to adapt, but they do have a number of useful features which IMHO the web has so far failed to replicate, such as strong editorial structures, proper investigative journalism (not just "in today's blog blog, we blog about a blog about something which someone wrong somewhere else"), accountability (once it's printed, it's printed), a selection of content which does not automatically conform to every pre-defined interest and prejudice of the reader, and a delivery method which involves passivity from the recipient rather than requiring the recipient to go out and proactively seek the information they want.
Does all of this mean they deserve to prosper in their current form? No. But I am scared if the Drudge Report is what is going to replace the Washington Post. On one level the issues facing newspapers seem to me to be facing society more generally: how do we manage our apparent addiction to short, semi-meaningless factoids now that we have a series of electronic systems for delivering them faster and more meaninglessly than ever before?
Read Pynchon.
I saw the dinosaurmedia tag and thought this article was about something much cooler.
Obviously, the Internet is to the American newspaper publisher and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.
Information wants to be free, you say? Well, so does Charles Manson!
advertising doesn't work as well as everyone thought.hat means that they ahve been over charging for it..or over selling it's value.
The internet brought that into sharp focus when you couldf get a real time response for an ad and pay for ads you know people have looked at.
Plus this is a transition period from a time you are probably too young to know. As such it all appears 'obviouse' to you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It seems strange to me that the advertising price is so different, can anyone give me a good explanation why an advertiser's paper advertisement would be more successful than the same advertisement on the web? The only good argument I can come up with is AdBlock, but given AdBlock's install base, I don't see this as being enough of a factor to account for the difference. Why would a printed ad be more successful than an online ad?
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
Of course this is because of PIRACY. People are turning to the internet to access FREE NEWS, and therefore are STEALING NEWS. Hundreds of thousands of reporters are out of work because of these criminals that are costing the industry trillions per yer.
At least, that's what Rupert Murdoch would like to bribe governments into thinking. Of course Mr. Murdoch, you don't actually "own" news either. It's stuff that happens, you know...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Most investigative journalists turn their research into books and make more money. Since most papers have already slashed their newsrooms, this leaves the papers to print what's on the newswire or Op-Ed pieces.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to the vice-president of a major academic institution. He told me that, in his opinion, paper in general was on the way out. I hope not. Paper content, despite its faults, can be trusted not to disappear with the flick of a digital switch. It is relatively durable, lasting for hundreds of years. And it is accessible; if it's on paper, you don't have to unencrypt it or have the right software or hardware to access it. If print newspapers die, it will be a disservice not only to us in the present, but for our descendants who might wish to study the way we were.
So the biggest recession for decades has nothing at all to do with it ? Considering that the locals have been gaining readers, I suspect that more people are looking for jobs close to home, and thinking FTW.
Newspapers, magazines, and pretty much anything else that was considered to have mass viewership 30 years ago is pretty much dead.
The summary mentions something about "Plan B". Well, the bad news is that for the most part, there isn't a Plan B. There is nothing that anyone can do about this - the readership numbers that kept newspapers alive are gone. Magazines have fewer readers and any "serious" magazine is pretty much dead today unless it is kept alive by huge subscription fees - the advertisers aren't interested any longer. So we have Cosmo and National Enquirer at the supermarket checkout and that is about it.
Plan B would have been online, but online is free and there isn't any mass viewership. That doesn't pay salaries. So where there might have been a reporter in 1975 there wasn't one in 1995 because of cost cutting. Today, the newsroom is empty because there isn't any way to pay anyone any longer. They can try to hang on by reprinting wire stories, but that isn't going to work.
News is now free and nobody is going to pay. And even more importantly, nobody is going to focus on a single web site enough to make it possible to get any real ad revenue. Wall Street Journal has a dedicated following for their speciality, but I wouldn't consider them a "newspaper" any more than you would consider Nature to be a magazine. Wall Street Journal and Nature are probably both going to survive, but I don't think anything like what we consider a newspaper to be is going to be around in five years.
News? Maybe you should start reading fark.com for its inciteful commenting and news selection. Or try to balance between dailykos.com and freerepublic.com - between the two of them you might come up with some idea of what is happening in the US. If you care.
Politico gives better national poltical coverage than my paper.
Michael Yon had some of the best field reporting on Iraq anywhere.
Analysis of security issues is amazing at Stratfor.
These cost less than a weekly subscription to my local major paper (Stratfor being the high dollar site).
Anyone who says there's no such thing as investigative journalism these days from the web is living under a rock. Anyone who thought there was once non-partisan investigative journalism took out a long term ARM on the rock.
Still, whenever I hear people lamenting the state of journalism and the loss of...whatever it is they think they're loosing...I wonder what they think should be done about it. A business that provided a valuable service is being replaced by other businesses that provide a similar service at a better percieved value. So what? Why is this an emergency?
It seems there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the information being propogated. People seem to think something should be done about it. You'll have to fogive me if I'm less concerned about the failure of newspapers than I am about the idea that those dissatisfied with the content of current news reporting think something should be done about it.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
I am newspaper reader, though I'm also a Generation Now as well. And I think the issue I face with a regular newspapers is that, although the story is completely relevant and maybe earth shattering. I inevitably find myself going online to follow it minute by minute. We already know that people have become increasingly impatient, especially with info and news on demand. But newspapers and magazine articles can't come close to this, they represent a snapshot of time. Even waiting for the next day to catch up is a pain, and still that news would be outdated. The internet has become a great venue for news to flow...up to date, minute by minute...exactly what we ask for.
I have ever seen a headline that used a third derivative.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
In a year or two, we'll "fondly" also remember him as the man who killed Hulu. :)
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
"Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins"
Why is that? If I PAY to subscribe to the newspaper, why should it be loaded with ads at all? My local paper has almost nothing worth reading in it. A bunch of AP articles, used as filler, that I can read for free online now and a boatload of ads. Very little useful local content. No wonder they are all failing.
From wiki:
Each Economist issue's official date range is from Saturday to the next Friday. In the UK print copies are dispatched late Thursday, for Friday delivery to retail outlets. Elsewhere, retail outlets and subscribers receive their copies on Friday or (more often) Saturday, depending on their location. The Economist Web site posts each week's new content by Friday morning, ahead of the official publication date.
Circulation for the newspaper, audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), was over 1.2 million for the first half of 2007.[38] Sales inside North America were around 54 percent of the total, with sales in the UK making up 14 percent of the total and continental Europe 19 percent. The Economist claims sales, both by subscription and on newsstands, in over 200 countries. Global sales have doubled since 1997. Of its American readers, two out of three make more than $100,000 a year.[39]
The Economist once boasted about its limited circulation. In the early 1990s it used the slogan "The Economist - not read by millions of people." "Never in the history of journalism has so much been read for so long by so few," wrote Geoffrey Crowther, a former editor.[40]
The Economist Newspaper Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Economist Group. The publications of the group include the CFO brand family as well as the annual The World in..., the lifestyle quarterly Intelligent Life, European Voice, and Roll Call. Sir Evelyn Robert de Rothschild was Chairman of the company from 1972 to 1989.
The Economist is a rare example of a printed paper that's still worth buying in print, and if they were to stop offering everything up for free on their website I honestly wouldn't have a problem with renewing my paid subscription. Quality writing, quality analysis that's still relevant even a few days after the event, and you don't have to wade through page after page of obtrusive advertising. It doesn't matter if it's a few days old, you can still give the reader an informed reading experience by explaining the background behind the news and what's likely to happen next according to reputable people who know their subject. The absence of partisan bombast makes it kinda refreshing too.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Perhaps newspaper executives should give their music industry counterparts a call and ask them what their Plan B was - it seems to be working so well for them, after all.
Oh, wait...
Seriously though, 'tis the nature of the beast. The world changes and industries have to adapt or face the risk of fading away into the history books. Companies run by smart people find a way to change with the times and remain relevant. Companies run by short-sighted idiots vanish.
I guess we'll see just how smart the executives at some of these companies are but I suspect I already know what the outcome will be.
So, Congress didn't make a law prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of the press, but capitalism killed it anyway. Hmm.
The amount of pure propaganda in the mainstream newspapers have exploded since the US started rapidly increasing false flag terrorism operations in the late 90s while the amount of actual real news have steadily declined. Could it be that people are getting smarter and are actually seeing through the propaganda now? I personally see no need to subscribe to newspapers anymore, they contain almost nothing but propaganda and blogs give a far more accurate impression of what is actually going on in the real world.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I see a lot of references to adapt or die or it's day old news. Most here aren't old enough to remember when the daily paper was the best source of news and none of us remember a time when it was the only source of world and national news. I've got a shocker for everyone. The First Amendment that most quote for an individual's right to free speech actually is aimed at the press not the individual. The Founding Fathers were concerned with the people getting fair and honest information not that people should be able to say whatever they wanted. The right has been expanded but that's what they were most concerned about, newspapers. The problem is the overall quality of news is declining with newspapers. There was a time TV news was a good source but now it's little more than sensational tabloid journalism. When something like balloon boy happens news ceases for a day or more. 911 was important but do you realize that TV news reported little else for weeks? Important events didn't stop they simply were buried. Most point to the web as an excellent source but it's the worst of all. News stories shouldn't be judged by volume but quality and there's zero quality control on the web. Even sources like CNN don't even have minimal editorial oversight, seen any misspelled words lately? That was rare with traditional newspapers even before spell checkers. Blogs for news? Most are opinion and mostly regurgitated stories. iReport style news? Great your neighbors telling you the facts. That's gossip not news. What's terrifying is the infrastructure for news reporting is dying so traditional news may have no future. Why should we care? Anyone remember the first gulf war? It was a historic moment when the CNN reporters managed to send out stories of what was really happening on the ground. Other reporters were showing all the missiles missing their targets and how poor the aim was on the Scud missile. Suddenly the military put a stop to it and miraculously every missile seemed to hit it's target and friendly fire was a thing of the past. Did the military suddenly get better? No, the quality of the reporting dropped. Take away the reporters on the ground now and I'll bet we start winning the war in Afghanistan. The Founding Fathers didn't trust the government and neither should we. We need a strong press. I'm not sure what the fix is but we shouldn't say good riddance to newspapers we should worry about what is going to replace them.
I use NPR for most of my real news. I often read/listen from their webpage for "free", but I still give them money when they ask for it.
In related news, blacksmithing has posted yet another year of steadily declining sales.
Newspapers provide a direct path for national and international news outlets to monetize information derived from real, on location, research and reporting around the world.
New media, and increasingly cable news, simply freeload off of information from other outlets and sources, and fill the rest of their time blocks and postings with uninformed opinion, speculation, and other filler.
This freeloading reduces the value of real information on the market because there are fewer and fewer entities willing to pay to receive the information from a primary a source, because they know that if they wait another 15 minutes they can get that information somewhere else for free, and for the same reason, even if they do pay for it, they have an increasingly difficult time profiting from it themselves.
I think in the future we will three a mix of outcomes:
A) Government owned information. Governments always have a need for up-to-date, in depth information from around the world, and would be more than happy for their populaces to turn to them as a source of information, where it will be appropriately spun and filtered.
B) Government backed information. Benevolent governments will provide the funding to support gathering and reporting of information that can not be effectively monetized. We will rely on the benevolence of publicly supported institutions to provide us accurate and timely information.
C) Global citizen journalist network. We are seeing this increasingly where private citizens on the ground where news is happening relay that information around the world free of charge, calling it as they see it, without any pretense of objectivity.
I've given up on the mainstream media (MSM). They have no integrity or validity as far as I am concerned. They are in my opinion nothing more than gov't or corporate shills.
Case in point is the WMDs and the war in Iraq. For months the New York Times (as well as other "legitimate" news outlets (I'm not counting the Fox network)) beat the drums of war. They helped stampede the US into the Iraqi invasion and discounted dissenting opinion and facts.
Then when no WMDs were found they buried it on page 7. One article for one day. Many Americans still believe there were WMDs and connections between Sadam and Al Q. If the NYT, and the MSM had beat the drums of "no WMDs" and "no ties with Al Qaeda" for months, what would American opinion be instead?
AFAIAC, they have no integrity and I do not trust the MSM.
The sooner they die the better.
(Yes, as a matter of fact I am ranting)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This decline in readership would explain why I seem to get a piece of junk snail mail every two weeks or so from the NY Times, asking me, no... BEGGING me to renew my subscription, offering up very deep discounts for me to do so.
I subscribed to them a few years ago for about 6 months for the Monday-Friday delivery service, because I genuinely like reading a physical paper in the morning, while I eat lunch, etc. However, it was expensive and just not worth it, since all the same content is online, so I canceled. I now read it every day on my iPhone.
I wonder, once papers get over the need to physically print and deliver papers, could they re-route that money to paying for more quality reporters? I imagine the paper, presses, operators, and delivery people needed for physical distribution add up to a sizable chunk of money... imagine not having to support that cost, and diverting the money normally spent on that to another part of your operations.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal?
Big Government broke the ACORN scandal, and the stuff around the NEA pushing a government message through art funding. That's at roughly the same level in that it's national news that had an impact on congress (they voted to shut of funding for ACORN).
Newspapers have failed to adapt, but they do have a number of useful features which IMHO the web has so far failed to replicate, such as strong editorial structures, proper investigative journalism (not just "in today's blog blog, we blog about a blog about something which someone wrong somewhere else"), accountability
Newspapers are an absolute joke for accountability. At best you may get a retraction so small and buried no-one will ever see it. At worst they simply ignore the fact they incorrectly reported on something and carry on as if what they said was the truth.
The blog standard is far superior, where usually the incorrect section is stricken through (but left readable) with a statement right below saying what they got wrong. The key is that the correction is attached to the original media, far stronger a correction.
And there are real investigative journalists today. Look at people like Micheal Totten and Micheal Yon for excellent independent and pragmatic war coverage of all the major theaters. We'll see more of that as newspapers continue to falter, and more people look for oversight of the government.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It ought to be either dealing with national or international issues.
And there it touches on local crime, it ought to be about analysis that forms general opinions of value to the nation.
But what we get is exploitation journalism that sees dollar signs in certain kinds of reporting.
www.daylife.com
hehe, shameless plug. But seriously, the future of news is curation and aggregation. :)
Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?
There is just less money in new online compared to print media. Advertisers are just not as willing to pay as much.
It's quite simple. In their efforts to "compete" with cable news to be first to the story, they slashed real investigative reporting, fact checking, and depth in their coverage.
They are guilty of dereliction of their duty to inform our democracy. They did not leverage their major advantage over cable news: freedom from constraints to 15 minute time slots.
They began publishing corporate and government press releases unquestioned.
They stopped digging deep into issues which really matter to the nation, uncovering actual political corruption or travesties of the political process (the daily show is the only one which seems to do this now).
Gone are the days where they stood up to governments and corporations for the right of the people to be informed. When was the last time you heard of a case like time magazine's pentagon papers?
"You write what you're told! Thanks Corporate News!"
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
One of the main reasons we stopped buying the newspaper is recycling. It's a PITA to have to store them, tie them up, etc. When the recycling rules/fines for getting it wrong got to the point where the paper became a pain, we stopped buying the paper
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
...by the time they covered Balloon Boy, they already knew he wasn't in it, and suspected a hoax! Where's the entertainment in that?
...for all intensive purposes.
You know, if online papers I liked had a DONATE button, I might send a few dollars there way now and again... nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com come to mind. It amazes me that they don't!
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
I'm an avid newspaper reader. Yet I'm also a newspaper hater. Reading a newspaper is like taking drugs: you look forward to it because you think you'll get something out of it, that it's somehow good for you, or otherwise solves some problem, but you realise too late that it's just a load of shite.
I mean, really - most new stories I read, even in respected broadsheet papers, are just inconsequential babbling about nothing. President Obama may be doing this, he might do that, somebody flew in a balloon, a movie star has offered an opinion on global warming, a European head of state has been fined for corruption, how to make a quick and easy omlette from 14 ingredients I would have to go out and buy specially ...
Big friggin' deal. I don't think I've ever put down a newspaper and thought "Now I feel really informed and stimulated - I can go into the world and act as a better person because of it." Mostly I just feel disappointed, or bored, and slightly soiled, because I find myself thinking whether any of it is true, or how much of it is half-true, or how much stuff I'm not being told, etc. etc.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Really? The GP should be subjected to George Bush because he chooses to get his news from an alternative source? It'd be one thing if he said that he never gets any news, ever, but then again, no one deserves George Bush, and he clearly demonstrated that he is still wired up.
I personally get my news from a ton of line sources. The wire services, but also blogs. And I get information from a bunch of those, from the leftists of the Daily Kos, to the right-wingers of Little Green Footballs, to the libertarians of lewrockwell.com, and many, many, in between. The great thing about it is these guys do not pretend to have an air of non-ideology. They straight up tell you their biases; no need for subtle hints, omitted facts, or turns of phrases to find out. You know straight away. And with all the conflicting views, you can build up a nice picture of the world.
SSC
And it finally explains all his pro-Fox News posts around here.
I do feel somewhat sorry for him; after suckling at the teet of Hannity and O'Reilly for so long, he honestly doesn't know any better.
You can get the Sunday paper for 1$ at most walmarts or a dollar store. To get the Sunday paper delivered is like 8$ a month (Hummm 4 x 1$ = 4$)
Is there some research that shows people are more likely yo pay attention to print ads than online ads? Because I have never paid attention to a print ad in my life.
The advertisements featuring attractive women wearing undergarments seemed to grab my attention. Heck, I used to stash those pages in my bookcase for late night "reading".
I worked for a few years in independent & corporate journalism, going from an independent (generally centrist) newsletter/news aggregation into a corporate newspaper company.
The culture clash between the digital style and the old print style was really right in the middle of things. And another key revenue factor that you can't get online: legally mandated classifieds, or 'public notice publishing,' in particular residential foreclosures.
If you're an electronic publisher you can't really capture the revenue stream from these government-mandated notices. They are a 20th century legacy and a major revenue source for smaller papers.
It is very successful to work on small niche audiences and develop long-running ad relationships with a few people. Going with bigger news 'targets' is a really tough proposition right now. Better to build sites in Drupal than try to make money in journalism, that's my new tack :-)
--hongpong.com
Exactly.
The free market isn't the best solution for all problems. News is a valuable commodity, but perhaps the internet makes it more like the army. We wouldn't have any army at all if it wasn't paid for by tax dollars.
The problem is, of course, that if the government holds the purse-strings, then public news may end up looking like pravda. The BBC has the correct solution, where they hold their own purse strings -- being able to effectively raise their own taxes. This helps to ensure their independence from the government, even though it is a public institution.
Note that public news organisations in western countries tend to produce the highest quality documentaries, current affairs and new broadcasts in terms of journalistic integrity. Perhaps the demise of corporate media is for the best.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I spend a big part of my life taking complicated scientific information and making it simple enough for people to read on the Internet in bite-sized chunks.
But sometimes it isn't possible.
Sometimes if you want to understand something important, you just have to sit down and go through something long, with difficult language, and boring parts, where you have to read it several times and look things up before you get it right. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html
The Republicans and Democrats are competing with each other to see who can destroy the common good faster and make more money out of it for their campaign contributors.
If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 that shows you how the free market system is failing and how the Bush administration was pimping the regulatory system, you won't understand what they're doing to you (us).
If everybody is like you, this democracy is in trouble.
Yeah, I read the blogs, I read Glen Greenwald, Common Dreams and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But even Greenwald (he's a lawyer) will tell you that sometimes the only way to find out the truth is to read the (long, complicated) original source.
This idea that you can take a lot of snippets from ideological bloggers on all sides, throw them into a box and somehow the truth will shake out, is like the idea that you can take a lot of bad mortgages, aggregate them together and have them turn into good investments. That's what we call "A mile wide and an inch deep." You wind up with a lot of manipulation and cynicism.
Sometimes you have to do hard work. And one thing I don't tolerate is being lazy when you have an important job to do.
You could make an argument that nobody deserves George Bush. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.
There was a time when newspapers cost 25 cents a paper (OK I actually remember a time when they cost a dime but let's go with a quarter). And for your quarter you got incredible in depth columnists, actual coverage of real local events that happened that very same day and oh yeah - 2 or 3 pages of comics that you could actually read without a microscope. And there were two newspapers, a morning and an evening one run by two different companies who competed with each other for the best coverage. IN the evening one you could read about what happened or what changed that very morning. Politicians were afraid of newspapers and if one screwed up you can bet that you'd hear about it that same day. I read two papers a day for decades.
Now my local paper costs a dollar and it is less than half the size that it was 10 years ago. The type is much bigger now and there are five columns per page instead of six - 17% less print per page. And it's mostly ads. And most of the news comes from a news service. And the columnists are non-existent. And I'm lucky if I get coverage of something two days ago let alone today. There's ony one paper in town and it's run by the same guys that own pretty much all the newspapers for 50 miles in any direction. The comics have been micro-sized. I now read a newspaper maybe once or twice a month. Maybe.
What happened?
Big fracking corporate business happened.
The kind that cares only about making a shot term profit for the current investors before cutting and running. Comics? Too costly. Columnists? Too costly. News bureaus? Too costly? More ads? Yeah, that'll work!
The same kind of people with the same kind of mentality who crapped up our banking industry, our food industry , our I.T. industry, our auto industry ... did it to newspapers as well. Big surprise there.
Here's your big headline "Corporate Fascism Kills America"
News at 11
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
My thoughts exactly. I happened to log onto Drudge probably within an hour of his posting the first ACORN video (I remember being amazed that only a few thousand people had bothered to watch it). My first thought was, "how come I'm not seeing this on CNN or 60 Minutes?" I think the destruction of the traditional media machine is one of the best things to happen for our society. We are really beginning to get a solid grasp of how the machine works - basically just supporting Wall Street and K Street. The most popular story in these discussions is usually Watergate. But what was the real cost in terms of dollars to report on this scandal? I really don't know, but it sounds to me like the real cost was just the time of the journalists, and bloggers seem to have nothing but time. I understand I'm going on an assumption, so it would be nice if someone who actually read book could give me an idea of what it cost The Washington Post to publish that series of articles.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
I hope the local Sunday paper doesn't go out of business.
No matter how much money I make...I love a bargain, and I enjoy clipping coupons for the grocery stores. Between that and shopping for what's on sale at the various stores, I eat like a king for cheap, and I never get bored eating the same old shit all the time. I see the sale ads, and the coupons, and decide what to cook for that week based on that.
Of course it helps to be able to cook from scratch, which seems to be a skill that seems to be disappearing these days. Lord knows how many girls I've had to teach how to cook a meal...but, that's another topic entirely.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The net is fine if I want opinions and assertions, and the newspapers aren't reliable sources of factual news. That doesn't leave them much of a niche.
These days I still have lots of print subscriptions, but not to any newspapers or news magazines. I don't like paying someone to lie to me. (I'll pick up an occasional copy of something, but it's as likely to be the "Weekly World News" as a standard newspaper. They don't try to fool me about lying to me.)
N.B.: Being staid and boring isn't the same thing as being trustworthy. It just means that even your lies are boring.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Perhaps I did deserve George Bush, and frankly, I am glad of it now that I can see how damaging the Obama administration has become. I never suspected that "W" would look so good in hindsight. America, I hardly know ye...
I completely agree with this article. We have a local free newspaper here in South Florida called the New Times that is incredibly popular. It usually has local news about corruption and hotspots in South Florida. In addition it has an occasional national article (it just had an article talking about how the government is doing nothing to the big wigs involved with the banking collapse) and it has some interesting movie reviews. Overall it has actually become more popular in South Florida and has gained more prominence and readership. Pretty much every single business has a New Times drop box in their waiting room and the community college I go to probably has more than 10 drop boxes which are always empty about a day after the papers are dropped off.
I mean if local newspapers just focused on good exciting journalism they would get plenty of readers. I mean I read a ton of news on online and I haven't picked up a national newspaper in years, yet every monday I sit down and read the New Times while sipping on a cafe con leche and having some rice and beans at lunch at my favorite Latin restaurant.
tl;dr?
"I'm sure it's a pretty niche market these days though :D."
You joke, but newspapers aren't going extinct, because it'll become a niche market too. Lots of big city papers will die off, but a few national papers will survive.
The problem is that big city papers are all trying to be the New York Times, a source of national news. But there's no way a newspaper can do that anymore with the Internet. So what you're going to see left in the market are local papers that concentrate on local stories, the kind that interest the public, but generally don't hit the Internet.
I think the only national paper you'll see grow in the long run is the Wall Street Journal, because no one can replace their in-depth business reporting. Notice they they only lost a fraction of a percent compared to all the others, and have generally been growing a little each period. No other paper can claim that. The WSJ has the ultimate niche market, and the most profitable one.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?
Because people have made it clear they're not willing to pay for content. They're not willing to pay for online subscriptions fees, and increasingly, they don't even want to look at ads. Look at some threads in this topic... people are mocking the Washington Post because they blocked their ads.
Where's the money going to come from to pay for online journalists? They have to buy the groceries somehow.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
At least we'll still have BBC news.
So? The quality of their work is about the same as most of the other major media news outlets.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"This is dying and has been for years."
Not really. Media outlets are just becoming more honest about their biases. Everyone still does real reporting. It never stopped. They just cover it from a favored angle. If anything, I'd say we're better off now. There's a network (sometimes more) for every point of view now. The British Press... the Times, the Guardian, etc, have been open about their opinions for years. But they still do quality journalism. The American Press is basically adapting that model now.
"Editors, and more importantly their owners (http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html) prefer light, cheap puff pieces "
Sometimes. Puff pieces can be profitable too.
"that don't disturb the citizenry"
Oh please. "Disturbing the citizenry" is Job One for the press... all of it. Disturbing headlines sell the most papers and get the biggest ratings. Swine Flu, anyone? If anything, the press has become more hysterical at times like these.
"alert them to little things like the fact that the treasuries of the world are being looted by the worlds wealthy"
Really? Who are these guys that are looting the treasuries? You make it sound like the Gates and Buffetts of the world went in with guns and bags and a note for the teller. Treasuries are being depleted, but I see populations across the world that want more benefits without wanting to pay for them. By far the biggest expenditures in the US are the entitlement programs... social security and medicare. I'd hardly blame that on "the rich".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
One day soon newspapers are gone
the only way to get daily news is the internet
You have to pay to get news
Nobody is paying for internet news, why bother, just the same 'ol shit day after day
News peddlers are now on the streets selling local news
"Hey buddy, want to know whats going on today?"
"Sure, why not"
"Give me 50 cents and I'll tell you"
"Here you go, 50 cents, so, what is new?"
"Well, guy A killed guy B, guy C killed guy D, guy C killed guy A for killing guy B, etc, etc, etc"
SSDD
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
There is the real problem with the newspapers, every story is blame Bush and Obama is great. When you do read the full 5000 word story you see that isn't the truth. So I assume you are complaining that others can't be bothered to find the truth while it is in fact you that can't.
I have yet to read a single example of Bush deregulation that caused this mess. I have read Clinton deregulations that caused it, but no one has yet mentioned a specific Bush example. Yet the blame Bush stories continue and people are fed up with the BS lies when they know better. Why pay for what you get from CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, or NPR for free. Its not like any one of those or major papers has ANY story that the others ones don't all copy word for word. Investigative journalism is a joke. NYT question to Obama in press conference "What has enchanted you most about being president?" How about "Why the hell can't you be bothered to fix the economy and create jobs instead of having 23 DNC fund raisers and spending every day talking about health care?" See, I scooped them all with that.
"The Economist is a rare example of a printed paper that's still worth buying in print," Nope, isn't worth reading. I was used to love the economist. It helped me to learn and improve my English but what happened to it? It was was a free-market advocate and if I read it now "government should do this, should regulate that, should give incentives here should give subsidiaries there...".
Thanks, I pass and don't read it anymore, even if you can download the whole magazine FOR FREE:
http://avaxhome.ws/magazines/economics_business_finances/The_Economist_October_24th_October_30th_2009.html
Why bother?
I'm sorry, but could you condense that into a 140 character Twitter-compatible post?
Impractical. The problem isn't reading *one* 5000 word story, it's figuring out *which* of those 5k 5000 word stories are worth reading...
You can't possibly be completely informed about every topic that can affect you (unless you spend all of your time "becoming informed" and no time accomplishing anything that actually matters). As a practical matter modern humans need to specialize. It makes us more vulnerable to the unscrupulous (a dishonest mechanic, a crooked politician), but it also makes us vastly more efficient.
You could make an argument that nobody deserves Barak Obama. That may be true. But we get him because Americans are too lazy to read a 5,000-word news story.
Imagine your favourite news site as a newspaper: printed on news print, the smell, ink getting on your fingers. Would you subscribe to it?
I don't understand why newspapers charge pennies on the dollar for ads. Why not charge print ad prices? It's up to them what they think the advertising is worth, and if readership is up online doesn't that support the case that it's worth more? Blogs are not serious competition for a newspaper website, most people I know who are untech savvy but still read news online go directly to their local newspaper's site.
If this was intentional; bravo. If not, HAA-HAA.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal?
Two names: Matt Drudge and Monica Lewinsky
Three more: Powerline, Little Green Footballs", and Dan Rather.
I could keep this up for pages.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What I find fascinating about the decline of newspapers comes from the fact well-known futurist and author Alvin Toffler warned about this very thing happening nearly 30 years ago in perhaps his most famous book, The Third Wave.
I suggest you pick up a copy and read the shockingly prophetic chapter, "De-Massifying the Media." Toffler wrote that with improving communication technologies, the days of mass media companies having a hammerlock on news distribution will come to an end. Since this book's publication in 1980, the rise of first proprietary online services in the 1980's and the public Internet in the 1990's allowed an end-run of news reporting around the mass media companies, and today we can can news in real time sent even to "smart" cellphones like a Blackberry or iPhone--including real-time video! And the public Internet has made it possible for the rise in citizen journalism--the so-called "pajamas media" as some pundits call it.Finally, the rise of eBay and Craigslist has effectively killed a huge fraction of newspaper revenue--classified advertising.
With cheap laptop computers (you can get a decently-equipped Windows 7 full laptop computer for around US$500-US$600) equipped with 801.11b/g/n connectivity, small wonder why people are getting their news from a computer nowadays, not from reading the paper delivered once a day or watching the once-a-day even network news broadcast.
Apple's much-rumored tablet computer could be perhaps the last hope for newspaper organizations--you will get highly-formatted digital versions of newspapers automatically delivered to this computer either by 3G cellular wireless or Wi-Fi to be read when you wake up in the morning.
There are still a small handful of old-school, honest journalists out there. Seymour Hersch and Robert Fisk come to mind. (Unfortunately, that's all I can think of.)
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 [pulitzer.org] that shows you how the free market system is failing...
There is little-to-no "free market system" in the US these decades. Finance and auto certainly do not qualify. Healthcare? Probably the least free of them all (professional licensing, device regulation, endless hurdles to deploy or import, perverse incentives to divorce decision makers from payers, etc). If you have missed this, it may not matter how many words you read.
You think like a ReThuglican Jew
It's a catch 22, the paper costs more because they can't demand the advertising prices. They can't demand the advertising prices because there aren't enough readers anymore.
Fact is, specially formatted news papers that can be viewed with news paper style type setting on a device like a Kindle as well as allow printing of sections to Letter/A4 pages would be the way I would buy a subscription.
No, it is because the majority of the people that voted for Obama simply can't read. They are just looking for a payday.
Sorry, rebel status or not, this was done decades ago: http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/magicalgadget/index3.html
Kirk: They're animals.
Spock: Jim, there is an historic opportunity here.
Kirk: Don't believe them. Don't trust them.
Spock: They're dying.
Kirk: Let them die!
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
The economic decline has forced newspapers to limit true journalism, which requires extensive (and expensive) research.
A second reason for the decline of newspapers is the explosion of the pop culture. The majority of people no longer care about issues, they care about entertainment, and newspapers don't offer that.
The newspapers are members of the MSM.
The apparent Liberal Bias at most papers (and major tv/cable networks) has diminished their credibility to the degree that their demise cannot be blamed on the emergence of the new media alone.
They have been derelict in their duty to the citizens of this country, hence the elevation and ultimate election of a closet socialist marxist idiot to the white house all the while being responsible for mass infliction of BDS, Bush Derrangement Syndrome, and it continues today.
The WMD issue is more representative of the reality that most deny, everyone believed Saddam had a working program since he Saddam, had an effective smokescreen in place, fooling all in our legislature and on the world stage but in the period post this, the newspapers blamed Bush ad nauseum and if one man could be held responsible it would be Saddam, not Bush but alas, the Liberal Bias was more important than objectivity.
Good Riddance, you have not served us well
This is false. The primary goal of a newspaper is to sell eyeballs. The information is what they use to attract them.
Comment too long, ignored
GWB's war has cost us $3 trillion, according to (Nobel Laureate) economist Joe Stiglitz. Your share of that is $10,000.
GWB's "death tax" repeal shifted another $3 trillion in tax liabilities from the richest 1% of Americans to -- you. Another $10,000.
Have fun paying your college loans. Have fun paying the insurance companies a 50% markup for your health care. Have fun paying your mortgage. Have fun working more years than your father did before you retire. Have fun with the social safety net when you're unemployed in the new economy.
http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=4773591
If you are concerned about it, read up on common cause's site and support them if you like what you read.
When you change something online, you can just change it and deny that it was ever anything else.
Wrong, because many people can so easily crawl your content looking for said changes. Any number of "real" media sites have been caught at this game, simply erasing something that turned out to be stupid - bloggers, knowing better, simply do not. Anyone blogging with any great regularity holds themselves to the same code where anything incorrect is struck through and a correction posted.
Even people not scarping the site, normal readers will catch things like that and say "if they are modifying the site in that way they cannot be trusted" and they stop reading. That's a powerful motivation not to do this.
Sites that try this find themselves on the sharp end of a lot of ridicule.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps you haven't been reading the news - George Bush is gone now. He's been gone about 9 months, according to my exclusive sources. The world's all better now. The new guy, I think his name is Barack Obama, has even gotten the Nobel Peace Prize, so that proves it.
"Netcraft confirms" or it didn't happen.
I Wouldn't mind paying my $10K for the war if that was all I had to pay. $10K/6years -> $1700 a year rounding up. It's a bargin compared to the amount I will have to pay for Obama's failed stimulus plan just this year. $800B/140M tax payers in the US = $5700 per payer. But, since I pay more in federal income taxes than 90% of other tax payers, the amount I get to pay is actually much, much greater. It's a great country isn't it.