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

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.

2005 as the start of the steep decline sounds right.

1999 was right before things really hit an infrastructure tipping point in terms of the Net as high speed delivery, IIRC.

I've mentioned this on other threads, but an indispensible site for following industry triage/amputation/death/autopsy: http://jimromenesko.com/

Innovative approach from the Irish newspaper industry: demand money from people who link to your content.

http://www.mcgarrsolicitors.ie/2012/12/30/2012-the-year-irish-newspapers-tried-to-destroy-the-web/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ

"We're probably not going to lose a lot, but we aren't going to make much either."

My local daily newspaper, The Oregonian, just announced that it will soon curtail home delivery to its subscribers to 4 days a week. Oh, it will continue to print daily editions. It just will refuse to home deliver these printed editions 3 days a week. Lucky subscribers will, however, be treated to full access to the paper's website, while non-subscribers will be given limited access and told to fuck off.

At the same time the publisher announced that the paper will degrade the quality of its product by making even more layoffs to its staff than the massive layoffs already made in prior years, which sure as shit means the website won't have many resources behind it, and the paper will shrink even more.

No reductions in retail cost were announced to accompany these reductions in service and quality. As a longtime subscriber I'm not very impressed with this strategy.

http://jimromenesko.com/2013/08/03/red-sox-owner-john-henry-agrees-to-buy-boston-globe-for-70-million/

NYT buys for $1.1 billion, sells 20 years later for $70 million. Ch-ching!

Meet your new Washington Post owner!

https://si0.twimg.com/profile_images/1563281408/amzn_fb-tw_Icon-global.png

More accurately Bezos himself but anyway.

Apparently he cashed out a load of stock the other day

https://twitter.com/tcarmody/status/363444171601747968

And there you go.

Purchase price $250 million.

lol for a min i thought robin was rich

holy shit

john henry of course also owns Liverpool FC

The paper that broke Watergate is worth exactly 1/4 as much as the app that makes your iphone photos look like bad early 80s snapshots. #trenchantsocialcommentary

This impenetrable drivel from Montgomery would be infuriating if it wasn't so depressing.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/who-needs-sub-editors-read-david-montgomerys-latest-unsubbed-2200-word-missive-future-local

I honestly don't even understand what he's talking about.

I mean the fact that he uses the phrase "one-stop shop for content" shows he doesn't have the faintest conception of how people actually consume digital media, even at local level.

tl, dr

My old paper, where I spent 7 great years, is no more.

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/275033/another-alt-weekly-folds/

(As noted there, the SFBG also folded this week.)

Not surprising, but sad. Especially because the paper was actually making a small profit.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/new-media-2/

Circa’s entire operation is oriented around mobile speed—both in terms of how long it will take you to consume a story and how quickly it can pump one out and send it wide. Instead of drawn-out articles—and in Circa’s world, seven paragraphs is long—it publishes something it calls points: bursts of facts written in such a way as to be independent of what comes before or after and that can be rearranged based on what someone has previously seen. When readers come to a story for the first time, they may need a bunch of bursts. But as they follow its development, they’ll probably only want to see the latest. This means that, unlike most breaking-news operations, Circa doesn’t have to report and write a complete story before it publishes. It can simply send out the components that it has at the time, then update later with further information.

Bloomberg has been doing that (and better) since the 80s

I'm a long-time lurker and recent victim of the rapid death of the newspaper industry. WilliamC posted about this in another thread, so I figured I might as well put it here, too.

In October, the Scripps newspaper chain shut down Metro Pulse, the (still-profitable) alt-weekly in Knoxville, Tenn. It was a good paper, and several ILXors either wrote for it or were written about by it. I was an editor there, and now I'm part of a project to launch a new weekly paper here. The plan is to combine a nonprofit parent organization with a for-profit publishing arm, so it can remain locally and independently owned. Lots of details in this Columbia Journalism Review story:

http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/knoxville_mercury_metro_pulse.php

and at our new website:

http://www.knoxmercury.com

Shameless plea for help: There's a Kickstarter to get everything off the ground. If you can donate, please do! If you can't, help us spread the word. We think it's a worthwhile effort and a good cause.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/789676771/knoxville-mercury-launch

http://jimromenesko.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/timesoops.jpg

ISIS event showcases homegrown talent, great atmosphere

All two of the ads in today's USA Today:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CXeEiQtWkAAN1b7.jpg

Not sure a positive politically neutral outlook is what the UK paper industry needs, but I'm all for slightly thicker paper and staples.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2016/feb/22/its-the-new-day-first-look-at-trinity-mirrors-new-newspaper

I'd love it if was a mad success and all the other papers rushed to slightly thicker paper and staples, like when the Independent went tabloid a decade ago.