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

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.

the comments on that story - the rote cynicism and negativity from people who probs know v little of the industry, actually - are pretty depressing, regardless of whether or not this paper looks to being a success or not.

The negativity extends elsewhere - the FT described it as "a newspaper without any news" today.

Apparently it's being printed in the down-time between Mirror runs so i'd guess it goes to press a lot earlier in the day than other titles.

wasn't the idea that it be longer articles about things in the news, going into the background, rather than actual news? (based on radio4 interview the other day)

thought Spotlight's win prompted it.

I saw a copy today and it appeared to be more of a daily newsprint magazine than a paper, almost no conventional 'news' but a couple of longer news features. Seemed to be aimed pretty squarely at the Mumsnet audience, most of the stories were about children in one way or another. That *might* be a smart choice of readership to pitch at, but they're planning on hiking the price to 50p which seems almost insanely optimistic given that the i exists.

I'm guessing there's little-to-no budget for conventional newsgathering, so focusing on features isn't the worst idea in the world. The market for paid news is collapsing but almost every current affairs magazine is increasing in circulation.

There was a general over-reliance on head-to-head debate articles. Also for all the claims about political non-partisanship, the EU debate page published a case for staying in (knocked out in about 10mins by someone in David Cameron's office) plus an 'undecided'. They just didn't bother to get anyone in from the Out campaign.

The whole thing felt pretty flimsy, but it isn't aimed at me. What it mostly reminded me of was an issue of First, Emap's ropey "female-friendly" current affairs magazine from a decade or so ago.

The New Day appears to be folding this week.

rip we hardly knew ye

fuck that was fast. is that a record launch-to-shutdown turnaround?

http://i.imgur.com/5xlX4ei.jpg

Jeez, what happened in 2007-2008?

my best guess: the Great Recession == the bottom falling out of ad revenue

Said in the "Mourning in America" thread but repeated here:

The press (broadly speaking) capitulating and normalizing Trump/Trumpism is a distressing prospect.

On the other hand, the press overtly presenting itself as an opposition entity (or counterweight) also has its problems.

Not least that it will sound (to lots and lots of people) like a nakedly partisan stance. It also makes lots of people kneejerkily question the press's ostensible commitment to the mushy and troublesome concepts that usually get called objectivity/fairness/balance/equal time.

I've said this often enough but "we say nice things about each party exactly half the time, and mean things about each party exactly half the time" is a very stupid criterion of fairness. But a lot of people seem to think that's what it means. Changing that perception is not simple.

If roughly half the people think being "objective" means only being mean to the president half the time, then we have a long ways to go before there can be an active fourth estate that has any legitimacy in the eyes of the public and any ability to inform/educate the persuadable public.

As long as there are tens of millions of people saying things like: Snopes is an Obama mouthpiece owned by Soros; why should I trust the obviously partisan Washington Post/New York Times; of COURSE Politifact and Glenn Kessler are biased leftists... The media's just preaching to the converted and it won't change any of the minds that need to change.

hat tip to Alfred for posting this link the other day on the Mourning in America thread:

And Scott at LGM's emphasis:

It’s worth pausing here to observe how astounding this is. The Times ran three front page stories about the FBI director having found some emails that very predictably revealed no relevant information about a trivial pseudoscandal that involved no significant misconduct by Hillary Clinton. Three. To choose at random from the countless things Donald Trump did that were far worse than legally using a private email server, Donald Trump called for innocent African-Americans to be lynched. A search of nytimes.com of “Donald Trump Central Park five” and “Donald Trump Central Park jogger” reveals no news stories and one op-ed about it. Perhaps the search is failing to pick up something, but we can safely conclude it received far less coverage.

The Harvard Kennedy Center also just published a study on how lopsided the coverage was:

http://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-general-election/

Key graf that reinforces my biases / priors, so of course I'll pull quote the whole thing:

When asked to explain their focus on Trump, journalists say that he made himself readily available to the press.[13] But availability has never been the standard of candidate coverage. If that were so, third-party candidates and also-rans would dominate coverage. They hunger for news exposure. Trump’s dominant presence in the news stemmed from the fact that his words and actions were ideally suited to journalists’ story needs. The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected. It’s about what’s new and different, better yet when laced with conflict and outrage. Trump delivered that type of material by the cart load. Both nominees tweeted heavily during the campaign but journalists monitored his tweets more closely. Both nominees delivered speech after speech on the campaign trail but journalists followed his speeches more intently. Trump met journalists’ story needs as no other presidential nominee in modern times.

In conclusion, journalism in America is basically all clickbait now.

sorry forgot the first two links

Perlstein's piece that Alfred linked to: Meet the Press: The hustlers, hucksters, hacks, and cowards who helped elect Donald Trump

The LGM mention of the Perlstein piece: A Disastrous Failure of the Press

(LGM also brought up the Kennedy Center study: The apotheosis of false equivalence)

is it the media's job to change minds tho? all i really want is tenacious reporting and a resistance at every turn the urge to take government and industry at their word, and to live in hope that honest reporting is in and of itself enough to help people think critically for themselves

of course there's very little money in investigative reporting, and very few reporters left who aren't reduced to desperately rewriting wire copy and press releases while chained to their desks 24/7. and the great work that people like fahrenholdt did over the course of the election ultimately amounted to fuck-all in the way of results, so i'm not exactly filled with enthusiasm for the future of honest reporting

perlstein's piece is booming and also crushingly depressing

I realize on one hand that the NYT is not the only rag in the business and that the complete failure of the media to inform the public was shared by nearly every news outlet over the past 12 months 24 months eight years two decades since 1991 or so, but on the other hand, if the NYT withered away and got bought out by RT or something, I'm honestly not sure what we would lose (I'm assuming Will Shortz gets picked up or goes into business for himself).

Also I have clicked on my TPM bookmark like 2 or 3 times since I signed up for TPM Prime. I didn't realize it at the time but I totally paid in so I can not read the news without guilt.

I think we'd lose a lot. Few newspapers have as many resources at the Times to do serious investigative reporting.