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 still enjoy reading the paper. I've been a daily subscriber to the Chicago Tribune for the past 8 years. However, in the past few months, their delivery service has taken a major turn for the worse. The paper is supposed to be on my driveway by 6:30AM, and it absolutely never is. I leave for the train at 7:00AM, and it took weeks of calling and threatening to cancel my subscription just to get them to start getting me the paper before 7:00. I still call most days to complain that it's not there by 6:30. I get a credit for the days that I call, so they're not making much money off of my subscription at this point. Overall, if anything is going to cause me to cancel my subscription, it's that the delivery service that used to be fantastic has become abysmal. Mostly I'm probably waiting for the larger, magazine-sized Kindle (or some competitor) to come out.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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.
The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior. I really don't see blogs and sites like digg and slashdot taking over journalism. They are great for commentary but don't produce original news, unless if there is an agenda.
...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.
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
That may be a goal... but I suspect it more effective (and definitely more polite) to display a "please don't block my ads, bro" message.
I run ad-block and have seen such messages from time to time. Basically, above the news or whatever it'll say "Hey, we noticed you're running ad-block. We can't stop you, but would you consider turning it off to support our sponsors or signing up for a subscription to our site, where you'll see no such adds displayed?"
Based on the tone, I've certainly paused block on certain sites I frequent every day, such as Slashdot. I trust them not to run shitty ads that will annoy me, and I help throw a few pennies their way. Granted, Slashdot doesn't nag you to turn ad-block off, but I do it anyways.