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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?
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.
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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.)
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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.
"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
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.
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.
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