Jack Shafer at Reuters has an article about the accelerating demise of daily newspapers, as more and more major papers reduce the number of days they publish and try to transition to the far less profitable online world. He points to the shocking numbers:
All of the industry’s vital signs are pointing south. Profit margins are way down, its stock prices have collapsed, daily circulation has fallen about 30 percent over the last 20 years, the percentage of adults regularly reading newspapers has been falling steadily since 1999 (especially among younger adults), and advertising revenue, which stood at $50 billion in real terms in 1984, fell to $23.9 billion in 2011. The corresponding decline in newspaper valuation is illustrated by three recent sales of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. In 2006, the papers went for $515 million. In 2010, they commanded $139 million. Just two months ago they sold for $55 million.
Of course newspaper owners aren’t the only heavies in the story. “The owner didn’t decide to shrink the paper,” said Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff in 2008 as the Detroit papers decreased home delivery from seven days to three. “The reader decided to shrink the paper.”
Other salient financial data points: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought the parent company of the Wall Street Journal for $5.6 billion in 2007, but wrote down $2.8 billion of that in 2009, essentially admitting that its value had halved in two years. The New York Times Co, once worth $7 billion, is now valued at less than $1 billion.
If you were a newspaper owner, you’d be liquidating and harvesting, too, and with the exception of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, that’s what most owners appear to be doing. Last week, Newhouse Newspapers* announced it was going to reduce the number of days it prints its New Orleans Times-Picayune and its Alabama titles from seven days to three days a week. This follows similar cutbacks in printing by Newhouse’s Michigan papers announced in 2011 and by the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News in 2009.
He also notes that the internet is just the latest technological challenge to newspapers — and maybe the final straw:
Everybody blames the Internet for the decline of newspapers, but the Web is only the most recent of electric interruptions to have disturbed their profitability, which began with radio in the late 1920s and was followed by broadcast television, car radios, transistor radios, FM radio, and cable television. Newspapers were in so much advertising trouble in September 1941 that Time magazine ran a piece (paid) about their “downward economic spiral.” Press scholar David R. Davies argues in his 2006 book The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945-1965 that daily newspapers were in serious trouble by the mid-1960s, because, among other things, they had failed to hook the baby boom generation. Los Angeles Times press reporter David Shaw sounded the alarm in a 1976 piece in his newspaper. It began: “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?” Update the figures and change a few dates and the names of the principals in Shaw’s piece and you could almost pass it off as a 2012 diagnosis of newspaper industry ills.
Newspaper owners may be running out of time to beat the liquidation clock if the prediction (pdf) made in January by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future proves accurate. Because the current generation of print newspaper readers aren’t being replaced, most major U.S. print dailies will be dead in five years, the report concluded. Very small newspapers might endure as dailies, as well as the large national newspapers – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today – and the local Washington Post. For other newspapers to beat the reaper, said the Annenberg report, they must downsize from daily to once- or twice-a-week publication.
I think that’s about right. Small, hyper-local papers will probably be able to survive, but they’ll have to be smart with their online presence. The big boys will keep going, but with fewer reporters and editors and fewer stories covered. Everything in between is likely to be gone at some point, or so dramatically reduced as to be irrelevant.
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daveau
June 11, 2012 at 12:23 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Of course, the article you point to is online, and I am reading this post online…
Blade Runner was on this past Saturday. It is supposed to take place in 2019. So, clearly, all the space exploration and humanoid robits are ridiculous. And no cell phones and the fancy green-screen computers are laughable. But what stood out to me is that Deckard spent a lot of time spying on people from behind a newspaper. Downright archaic.
randyc
June 11, 2012 at 12:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think that the biggest challenge to newspapers is not the Internet but 24-hour news channels. It is now the case when the morning paper is delivered, it only contains old news.
I learn who won a particular primary election a few minutes after the polls closed. I don’t have to wait until the next day.
I’m also a sports fan. I know whether my favorite team won or lost – with highlights – well before the paper comes out. That’s on those occasions that I didn’t watch the team play live on TV.
That’s why “hyper-local papers” will probably survive. There is no other source for that sort of news.
But the mainstream newspapers? I don’t think so.
The Lorax
June 11, 2012 at 12:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The Internet was a terrible blow, but adding insult to injury is the proliferation of tablets and smart phones. Now, even if you’re out on the job, you don’t need to pick up a hard copy, just whip out your gizmo, log in, and be blasted by digital media.
Of course, this is just print newspapers that are going down the tubes; most major newspapers (and a great many minor ones; creating a website, especially a crappy one, is not difficult) have migrated to the ‘tubes, and will continue on, just in a different format.
The times, they are a-changin’.
eric
June 11, 2012 at 12:40 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I now read stories from a wide variey of newspapers online. Papers I never would’ve read before the internet, out of sheer inability to access them. Because of the internet, I read more newspapers…just not in print form.
So, I think the appetite for the content newspapers provide is mostly still there. It may even grow, if my viewing habits are any example. It is the physical infrastructure – the literal printing presses and paper – that are losing value. And, of course, there’s the issue of how to get people like me to pay for journalistic content when we are quickly becoming used to getting it for essentially free.
Michael Heath
June 11, 2012 at 12:44 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m surprised no one has yet mentioned the seemingly increasing apathy of people to reading in general. I encounter multiple snafus in business transactions on a monthly basis because someone didn’t take time to read what was necessary for them in order to successfully execute their end of a business deal.
Midnight Rambler
June 11, 2012 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The thing is, when you read multiple newspapers you quickly find that they’re all just regurgitating the same twaddle from the AP. And even when the wire services do good reporting, it rarely makes it into any paper except some of the major ones. Of course it ends up being a positive feedback loop – when the paper starts to falter financially it doesn’t have as much resources to do good reporting, and its circulation drops even further. But I think the poor reporting started first.
Ray Ingles
June 11, 2012 at 1:11 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The Internet is upsetting the economy in a lot of areas, and frequently not to the good:
https://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/meet-the-new-boss-worse-than-the-old-boss-full-post/
That’s a musician who’s also a tech geek *and* a mathematician, who points out that the demise of the record labels isn’t entirely the rainbows and sunshine some thought. I do wonder about the future of journalism in ‘The Digital Age’ ( ® ).
eric
June 11, 2012 at 1:12 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Michael – I don’t think there’s an apathy for reading, just an apathy for reading that sort of document. Those same young businesspeople who are glossing over contracts are probably writing reading tens or hundreds of Facebook messages per day.
ogremk5
June 11, 2012 at 1:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wonder just how much, if any, is that many people are comparing their newspapers to what they read online and thinking “how did the newspaper get it so wrong?”
Of course, as Midnight Rambler mentioned, the national and world news of any newspaper is all copied AP stuff. But newspapers have gotten so biased it’s not even funny. If it wasn’t for on-line, I wouldn’t even know that one of our city councilors has a competitor in the election. Dozens of interviews, political opinions and columns in the local rag and no indication that there is even someone running against him.
It seems almost like creationism. Once people really start looking at what they are reading (if they will really start looking at it), then they start wondering if that’s really all there is to some of these stories. And then it’s a short leap to doing their own research. Which is the death of the regular newspaper.
IMO, the newspapers did it to themselves by allowing fundamentally biased reporting.
raven
June 11, 2012 at 2:25 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I read the local papers every day.
Online. They never ask for money but I would even pay a reasonable fee to do so.
I’m really glad to not have to toss piles of newspapers out every few days.
ahcuah
June 11, 2012 at 5:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This reminds me of one of my peeves with local TV news. They still run teasers. You know, the stuff that’s supposed to make you stick around for their entire newscast. E.g., “New study shows blah, blah, blah. News at 11:00!” But if it is interesting, I just go to the web and look up the story.
Just as with the newspapers, it is as if they are blind to the internet.
harold
June 11, 2012 at 6:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I will expand on why this is difficult. I am describing a situation, not advocating anything. I use the pronoun “I” in the sense that I am a typical consumer.
It’s difficult, because I paid for my computer. I pay again for a fast connection to the internet. I do more on my computer that isn’t directly internet related than most people; still, internet is related in some way to 99% of what I use my computer for.
I’m already at the many cable channels or satellite radio stage. I paid for the receiving technology AND I pay plenty for the signal, too.
To demand payment for something like the New York Times web site is to step into pay-per-view territory, except that it would be pay-per-view with ads (I do somewhat selectively block certain types of advertisements). I already bought the computer, I already paid for the internet service, you’re selling ad space on your web site, AND you want me to pay again?
Now let me make another point. When I was growing up, I got many books from the public library (where multiple daily newspapers were often also available). My friends and I all made many cassette tapes for each other – often of albums we bought in used record stores (the public library often has music, too). Some sharing of content is inevitable and legal. (I realize that the cassette tapes weren’t, but music sharing was as common then as it is now – people took great pride in their personalized cassettes.)
Ben P
June 11, 2012 at 6:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That’s the interesting thing and the thing where we don’t have a good replacement.
Your modern small city newspaper is usually a pretty slim operation. They’ll have maybe 10 reporters on staff at most, often as few as 3-4. (A sports guy, a police beat/politics guy, and a couple younger ones). The rest of the paper is stuff pulled from the AP and adds.
Where newspapers have declined but nothing has yet risen to fill the void is organizations providing quality local news and reporting online. Some of that void is filled by TV investigative reporters and the websites associated with TV channels.
Facebook groups have also started to move into the void. one of the most interesting things I read on a daily basis is the “crime beat” of a guy who is from my neighborhood and basically just publishes under a pseudonym on facebook.
josephmccauley
June 11, 2012 at 7:52 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m hoping for the demise of cable. “Toddlers and Tiaras” is still on. Almost everything about cable is a disappointment.
Trickster Goddess
June 12, 2012 at 2:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m in my 50s and right now, for the first time in my life I have a subscription to a daily newspaper. I only have it because the paper called me up and offered a free 3 month subscription.
In one way it’s good since I now read articles on the page that I probably wouldn’t have clicked on online. On the downside, when I read a columnist who is full of shit, I don’t get to see all the commenters ripping them apart.
kermit.
June 12, 2012 at 11:01 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
eric: Those same young businesspeople who are glossing over contracts are probably writing reading tens or hundreds of Facebook messages per day.
True that, but those messages are mostly one-liners.
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One thing I am worried about is the reduced budget for reporting. Many areas of interest to us will be reported, but not on one site. Instead of turning to the “science section” or the daily newspaper, I now turn to scienceblogs, Climate Progress, and similar sites. But who will send reporters to investigate various crimes, international events? A single blogger and his/her team can’t afford that. Perhaps Reuters or AP, and their stories distributed to various blogs and news sites for a small fee. But so far I seem to be much better informed than I was 40 years ago.
I’ll bet everyone here has a number of sites bookmarked, each covering a different news area of interest.
A disadvantage is that we are culturally Balkanizing. It’s easy now for Tea-Baggers, pop star obsessed fans, and all other varieties of identifiable groups to insulate themselves from the mainstream narrative. While this can be good – I’m getting a lot more science news than I used to – it also means that Dittoheads never hear reasonable people presenting the news, with all of the problems that this presents.