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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."
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 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.
... it's nearly 1 day old
Why can't the internet have Salaried journalists?
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 used to be the case that a lot of people would pay for their daily newspaper. How much are you paying for your online news these days? I really worry that the internet is turning us all into quick fix news junkies unable to spend more than a few seconds grazing headlines and that considered prose is slowly passing.
>salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story.
This is dying and has been for years. Editors, and more importantly their owners (http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html) prefer light, cheap puff pieces that don't disturb the citizenry or alert them to little things like the fact that the treasuries of the world are being looted by the worlds wealthy and that oil depletion issues are going to start rocking our world in an unpleasant way in the next decade or two.
.
So we get Yahoo and MSM, where the top stories are "10 ways to know if he/she's cheating on you!" and "How to tell if you're a f***king idiot." (Hint, you're reading Yahoo's front page.)
.
The internet, however, is still relatively free although who knows for how long. If net neutrality is withdrawn, you can forget that too.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
There also are essentially none of those left in the national papers, so the lack of an "alternative" is less relevant. Actually, with many papers retooling to shift toward less focus on advertisers for revenue and more focus on readers, there is a good chance that the decline in per-paper circulation will revive journalism, as the business of the papers becomes, once again, delivering news to readers, rather than delivering an audience to advertisers while avoiding offending those same advertisers.
While you don't see a lot of people like that in any media, at any time, the internet sure isn't doing any worse of a job of producing investigative reporters than the modern print dailies. Which isn't meant, particularly, as praise of the internet news outlets.
Undoing accidental +1 Interesting when I meant to hit -1 Offtopic.
(Can we have an "undo moderation" button that appears for 5 seconds?)
"I think that no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Internet has allowed you to broaden your horizons"
Or more likely the internet provides a convenient place to get opinions that agree perfectly with mine, so why should I read a newspaper that I sometimes disagree with and that is therefore stupid and wrong and biased?
Ya know "objective reporting" is a myth. Prior to 1950 the Philadelphia Inquirer proudly trumpeted that it was pro-Republican. Many papers had the words directly in their names - "The Peoria Democrat".
And I see nothing wrong with that. Newspapers were invented as a way for the owner to express his views. If you didn't like those views, create a competing newspaper. That's what liberty and "free press" means... to say whatever you want to say, even if it's biased towards your own view.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
And whichever kind they were, they strove to be at least somewhat accurate rather than just a PR outlet.
This is the newsbiz's real failing: they have become entirely unreliable. You can no longer read a newspaper and have any confidence that you're getting even an approximation of the facts. Newspapers used to do journalism, or at the least give it the old college try.
This means that newspapers (and TV & radio news) have no real innate value. It's hard to retain readers when you aren't offering them anything worthwhile.
I work at a news web site. A while back, we had a troll come through (drenching sarcasm, driven by 90+ wpm). People on our forums started modding him down, reducing his comments to irrelevancy. People, including some from our print group, were marveling at how online participation and comments in the news can provide so much value.
"Try doing that with a letter to the editor," I observed as I walked by.
The Washington Post is a pale shadow of the paper that broke Watergate. Personally I stopped reading it about the time they fired Dan Froomkin and their execs thought it was cool to sponsor pay-for-access cocktail parties with politicians. Their online site was showing promise until Katharine Weymouth canned the people making it happen and forced consolidation with their print division which was like mixing oil and water. Last month they issued guidelines forbidding their reporters from using Twitter and other social media which shows their dinosaurish nature. Dan Froomkin is now in charge of the Political section of... the Huffington Post. Jim Brady another Washington Post luminary is starting a new online Washington news site for Politico.
If you want to hop in the way back machine to just before the Iraq invasion, Judith Miller, used the New York Time to shill for her books on WMD's and for the Bush administration to whip up the frenzy about non existent WMD's in Iraq. This has since cost the U.S. about a trillion dollars and thousands of dead and tens of thousands wounded for a lie, which a dead tree journalist helped propagate. Of course the Hearst empire pioneered yellow journalism and shilling to start wars for no reason in 1898, "Remember the Maine", so its not a new phenomena. And of course in 2003 the NY Times also had Jayson Blair who made a career on plagiarized and fabricated stories and it took forever for the Times editors to notice.
So to balance that one Watergate success story everyone cites in these debates there have been multiple recent failures. The U.S. press was pretty much asleep at the wheel during Iraq, Patriot Act abuses, torture, warrantless spying on Americans on a massive scale, etc. The NY Times did break the warrantless wiretap story but only after it had been running for years.
You seem to be waxing nostalgic for old school journalism that doesn't really exist anymore if it ever did. I'd being willing to bet if Woodward and Bernstein were to try to break Watergate today, Nixon would call up the Washington Posts management/editors and it would be killed before it saw the light of day because the management of most papers today are pro establishment and pro corporate interests instead of a beacon of truth and freedom. All the Presiden't men was a product of a handful of unique people who did something amazing and right, it had nothing to do with the actual merits of dead tree journalism.
I too would wax poetic for old school journalism but to think its still even alive or it will flourish in the brain dead environment that is most dead tree newspapers today is optimistic at best. I have to hope the web actually does succeed in producing a beacon for truth and freedom and that it rises above the sea of noise that is the web. Its a long shot but its a lot more likely than hoping for dead tree newspapers or TV networks to be honest stewards of the truth.
I gather AOL is hiring reporters at a furious rate and the plan of the new CEO who came from Google is to make it in to the leader in online Journalism. I wish him well, though my brain has seizures whenever I see the brand he is working under.
@de_machina
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+
How about James O'Keefe and Hanna Giles (the ACORN undercover videos)? Granted, they weren't salaried, but the Internet can produce a good story. Without Youtube, blogs, etc their story would have not gotten the press it did. It will probably be a few years yet before these sort of Internet journalists get more practice and find the right niche, but it's a start.
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!!
BBC, CNN, Fox news etc websites will still be around when they die.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
I guess you haven't heard of Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe? And their expose of President Obama's former employer ACORN?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Would that be the British people who pay a TV license to the BBC which is accused of being the broadcasting arm of the Labour party?
Oh the BBC does get accused of having a liberal bias from time to time, but there's nothing as blatant as, say, Bill "yell and scream when losing an argument before you cut off the guest's microphone" O'Reilly and Sean "Cut the Obama footage off in mid-sentence and claim he said the opposite of what he really said" Hannity.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
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.
Well there was the ties to Al Qaeda thing, also been proved False.
There was the "to get Iraq's oil thing", well if that was it we completely botched that since I think the Chinese have more Iraq oil contracts than the U.S. now. It would take a LOT of oil to pay back the trillion dollars we've squandered there.
There was the "excuse to give huge no bid contracts" to all our Republican connected friends. Check. That one is a winner.
There was the "to bring Democracy to the Middle East". That's iffy at best. We mostly created a Shia dominated, Iran friendly, theocracy with a whiff of disfunctional Democracy. Once we pull our troops out it could crater in to a civil war in a week.
There was the "to kill Saddam" because he tried to kill my dad(George W's dad). That might be a winner.
There was the "my daddy botched the first Gulf War and I have daddy issues" so I had to do it again and prove I'm better than my daddy at the price of $1 trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed.
I could go on... maybe you should tell me the reason for it... I really can't think of any that actually make sense, Mister Anonymous Cowtard?
@de_machina
And yet here you say you have nevre read a newspaper in your life. How the FUCK would you know if they have biased reporting? By your own words you have never even SEEN it.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
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...
tl;dr?
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.
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.
...or, going back a few more years, where did the story regarding fabricated Texas ANG memos used by Dan Rather and 60 Minutes to try to throw the 2004 election break? Not only did you hear about that in the blogs first, but it involved malfeasance that calls into question the credibility of the MSM.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
In America we have Fox (far right wing), CNN (right wing), and NBC (centrist). ... and CBS (centre right) and ...
This is how the rest of the world sees it. You don't HAVE left wing politics, merely different shades of right wing.
This is false. The primary goal of a newspaper is to sell eyeballs. The information is what they use to attract them.