Is there a thread for the rapid death of the newspaper industry?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/help/insideguardian/2011/apr/27/guardian-local-update

Guardian kills its local project because it's "not sustainable". Where does that thinking end then, eh?

I'd guess that Dave Hill's London blog is safe, though.

the guardian as a whole isn't sustainable. they should give a better reason why they picked this from among their many unprofitable activities.

Ooh, a big gypsy sex cheat!

Weird how they don't explain AT ALL what the criteria for continuing it were, why those criteria weren't met, etc.

There are still jobs for journalism majors out there.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/jun/09/daily-record-mediabusiness?CMP=twt_fd

In June 2001, the Record was selling an average of 596,000 copies a day. In April this year, the latest ABC figure, it sold just 312,000. [...]

I can see that the Record, in concert with all the red-tops in Britain, has lost its way - and there is no apparent turning back.

So, and I know this is going to upset the journalists who work there (plus others who don't), there is no genuine point to the Record.

I have no especial brief for Trinity Mirror - as I must have made clear endless numbers of times on this blog - but its willingness to continue publishing the Record and Mail could be viewed as an act of charity.

1. the guardian's circulation is 263,000, nearly 50,000 less than the daily record despite a larger target market in the whole of the uk
2. what a cunt

3. he wears stupid waistcoats

4. Glass houses, stones, etc.

I think allot of industries have to adapt or die these days - ie. the music industry. I think there is still a desire for local news but not necessarily in print

So apparently we missed this last week? Good luck building a sustainable business model there guyz.

what are they supposed to do?

they've been "digital first" since 2006 or something, so i'm not really sure what they're announcing now. i think it's just the CEO trying to make it look like he's got a strategy other than merely managing decline. although - and i've bored on about this before, sorry - the guardian would be financially very healthy if they hadn't made their stupid private equity deal.

the print edition will include less 'news' and more analysis.

lol everyone says this when they realise things are going to shit because they've sacked all the reporters, cf the independent's viewspaper. comment is cheap, but facts are hard to come by.

elsewhere, they announced that their recruitment advertising had fallen by £41m, but they are giving job ads away for free at the moment. i guess if you're the sharpest business brain you're not likely to be attracted to a hippy outfit like the graun.

so was the times paywall the total fucking disaster everyone predicted? haven't heard much gloating so i presume it wasn't that bad

i want the times paywall to succeed, less because i care about the times and more because i want cory doctorow to be wrong about everything

anyone planning to see the NYT documentary? I feel I couldn't care less about it.

I've seen it; it's not bad but it's really insular. You'd think the Times was pretty much the only paper in the world facing these things.

so was the times paywall the total fucking disaster everyone predicted? haven't heard much gloating so i presume it wasn't that bad

London Times? From what I can tell it's neither abject disaster nor roaring success, but they won't break their subscription figures down (79,000, but no-one knows how many are discounted, special offers etc) so no-one can really tell how much money is coming in (like it's def not enough to turn a profit, but it could be anywhere between beggaringly little or a promising amount).

Here's the story, most things I saw were similarly hesitant.

Well done, the Evening Standard:

http://i.imgur.com/t5YEq.png

There's a really fucking weird interview with Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz in today's Sunday Times Magazine. All about his "lifetime in public life" and the day the family feared could be his last: turns out it was 9/11. Really makes them both out to be creepy and out-of-touch.

Then in the review section of the paper Andrew Sullivan absolutely destroys him in an article entitled "Dastardly Dick, America's Worst Vice President".

It's almost like someone at News International is annoyed Cheney's book went to the competition.

Oh god I saw an article about that parachutist, but the paper here just showed a photo and the article which I thought was awful enough - to have video AND COMMENTS!? Thats just horrible.

(lol "the paper here" makes it sound like the entirety of Australia has a single newspaper. Um, I sppose if you count Murdoch press as a single cthulubeast it isnt too far from true, mind you)

Is there a thread for the prolonged death of the cheese farmer?

http://i.imgur.com/0186q.png

I can't work out what's worse, the fact that he was paid to write that shit or that he was prepared to put his name to someone else writing that shit.

Grab a slice and cook it in some leftover bacon juices.

That kicks Krispy Kreme's a*** any day.

god he's a cunt

A brilliant new-look Mirror website was launched early this morning ... and then, as is traditional in digital publishing, promptly crashed.

RIP

This is going well:

http://i.imgur.com/qds7K.png

first response hall of fame

Martin Clarke v interesting at Leveson today http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2012/may/09/martin-clarke-witness-statement-leveson-inquiry

NOLA Times-Pic dropping its printed product back to 3x/week, reportedly cutting newsroom staff by 1/3.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/new-orleans-times-picayune-to-cut-staff-and-cease-daily-newspape/?hp

That's sad

Advance also said Thursday that three major daily newspapers that it owns in Alabama will switch to publishing three days a week as part of a new focus on online news: The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and the Press-Register of Mobile.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g-VEJIvNQKJKPe6Pz4fWFot76Iyw?docId=ecc3151fb82e44dd98446f33dd4258c7

Meanwhile, Warren Buffett is buying newspapers:

Buffett is adding to Berkshire’s newspaper holdings with the $142 million deal announced May 17 for Media General Inc. (MEG) publications including the Richmond Times-Dispatch of Virginia. The billionaire, who bought the Buffalo News in 1977 and said in 2009 that newspapers have the potential for unending losses, is now betting that papers with a community focus can profit as they change their models.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-24/buffett-says-free-news-unsustainable-may-add-more-papers.html

I think he's right that there's still a void to fill in terms of local/community information, and probably a way to make money off this, but I'm not clear on how he thinks existing newspapers are going to fill that void without going bankrupt.

Yeah, I'm not sure if he knows either.

...Buffett wrote in a letter to editors and publishers of Berkshire’s daily newspapers. "We want your best thinking as we work out the blend of digital and print that will attract both the audience and the revenue we need."

I thought AOL's "Patch" was a perhaps good idea that was ATROCIOUSLY executed. But something like that could work maybe, a sort of national network of local news sites, taking advantage of certain scalable aspects while keeping the content completely local and locally reported.

patch may be good in theory except for the part where huffpo hired a bunch of 23 year olds right out of college to run the sites and expected them to turn a profit immediately

I think a lot of Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods would support more extensive and better quality local coverage, just for example. The big dailies mostly stick to the *trendy* angles on brooklyn and all but ignore queens. No great source for real local news. The Brooklyn Paper seems spotty. Highly literate and interested populace, big city.

patch is terrible in theory too, because the economics just don't work. there's no way to make it add up.

well, it could plausibly work in major cities, everything after that, forget it.

http://blog.scrapperduncan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Rupert_Murdoch.jpg

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/175122/will-new-orleanians-follow-the-times-picayune-online-after-it-cuts-back-on-print/

analysis--uh maybe

Dead newspapers, dead Middle American democracy

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/11/dead_newspapers_kill_democracy_dead/singleton/

http://www.nola.com/business/index.ssf/2012/06/times-picayune_employees_to_le.html#incart_river

They just canned a bunch of the staff

http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/brett-anderson-new-orleans-food-writer-is-laid-off/

times-picayune pretended the BP oil spill didn't happen until the national media picked it up. seriously. there was a tiny story on the rig explosion and then nothing for like two weeks. in a town/state utterly subject to the sordid whims of energy companies. weird huh.

i know i should be all wringing my hands on the decline of professional journalism or something but if the t-p is an example of modern american newspaperdom just let the whole thing die.

Yeah, AEI link, but:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/newspaperads-600x413.jpg

The blue line in the chart above displays total annual print newspaper advertising revenue (for the categories national, retail and classified) based on actual annual data from 1950 to 2011, and estimated annual revenue for 2012 using quarterly data through the second quarter of this year, from the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). The advertising revenues have been adjusted for inflation, and appear in the chart as millions of constant 2012 dollars. Estimated print advertising revenues of $19.0 billion in 2012 will be the lowest annual amount spent on print newspaper advertising since the NAA started tracking ad revenue in 1950.

Oof.

Surprising that they were doing so well in 1999.