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The Slow Death of the Newspaper?

post #1 of 14
3/31/09 at 11:25am
Thread Starter 
The Sun-Times Media group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today. It owns and operates 59 newspapers and online sites, including the Chicago Sun-Times. Tons of other major newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy (including the Washington Post and the New York Times), and many more have already closed.

What relevance do newspapers have in the internet world? When you can get up-to-the-minute news for FREE online, why bother paying for day old news?

Can newspapers be saved? SHOULD they be saved?
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post #2 of 14
3/31/09 at 11:46am
Thread Starter 
Personally, I have no use for a newspaper anymore. I get all of my news online off of cnn (or other similar sites), and I get all of my advertising deals/coupons online. I have no need of the classified ads section, as all of that stuff is online now. We cancelled our newspaper a year or so ago; we both got tired of scanning headlines that were already old news.

For those of you involved in journalism: are you finding that alot of the print journalists are scrambling to find jobs/outlets in the internet realm?
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post #3 of 14
3/31/09 at 12:10pm
Was just discussing this earlier, as the Washington Post has made big changes, most recently folding the business section into the A section. I still take the paper every day, mostly out of habit but there is some convenience, too. On the weekends two people can sit around in their jammies and share the paper. It's easier to take the sports section into the crapper than to carry a laptop in there. And I still prefer to read in-depth off paper versus screen.

But who reads "in-depth" anything anymore? The daily newspaper is probably doomed. A weekend version with local news and analysis of bigger events from the previous week, like a local Newsweek, is probably the only way they'll survive in print.
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post #4 of 14
3/31/09 at 12:13pm
Stick a fork in 'em, they're done. This is the best piece I've read on the subject. Everyone should read it.

From the concluding paragraphs of that piece by Clay Shirky:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clay Shirky
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
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post #5 of 14
3/31/09 at 12:27pm
Thread Starter 
Great article, Eyeball. Thanks for the link.
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post #6 of 14
3/31/09 at 12:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eyeball Kid View Post
Stick a fork in 'em, they're done. This is the best piece I've read on the subject. Everyone should read it.

From the concluding paragraphs of that piece by Clay Shirky:
That was a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing.
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post #7 of 14
3/31/09 at 12:46pm
Only the recording industry has done a worse job than newspapers in managing the impact the internet has on their business.
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post #8 of 14
3/31/09 at 12:49pm
You're welcome. I got it from BoingBoing a while back. Actually, it might have been from Cory Doctorow's Twitter. Either way, it came from Doctorow, and everyone should be following him in Twitter and reading BoingBoing too anyway.

I really think Shirky makes a pretty airtight case here. We ARE in the midst of revolution, and the only way I see newspapers coming back is in the case of societal collapse where we lose generalized cheap access to the internet and fall back on the printing press. I know which outcome seems more likely to me, though you can find apocaphiles all over the net (Kunstler, Orlov) who think we're headed for collapse in short order.
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post #9 of 14
3/31/09 at 6:24pm
I am so relieved I didn't chase a journalism degree two years ago.
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post #10 of 14
3/31/09 at 6:45pm
While I will miss the physical joy in holding a paper (there is just something so primal and right about reading the day's paper) I weep not one tear for the industry itself. Their failure to compete doomed them. As the world was waking up to the digital age and all it offered the papers tried to be haughty and stand above it all. The Internet didn't kill the newspaper, the newspaper industry killed the newspaper.
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post #11 of 14
4/4/09 at 9:30am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Judas Booth View Post
The Sun-Times Media group has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy today. It owns and operates 59 newspapers and online sites, including the Chicago Sun-Times. Tons of other major newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy (including the Washington Post and the New York Times), and many more have already closed.

What relevance do newspapers have in the internet world? When you can get up-to-the-minute news for FREE online, why bother paying for day old news?

Can newspapers be saved? SHOULD they be saved?
Just as there are people who will never touch an e-Book, so there'll always be people who'll prefer newspapers.

They're hurting at the moment, but only because they were overexposed in the first place. The industry will contract and concentrate on core readership. If they can still afford to pay the best writers they will get the readers. Content is king.
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post #12 of 14
4/4/09 at 12:30pm
I work for a small independent weekly newspaper, and we're doing ok. Although, that's really a different thing as we're not offering daily news, and it's free. It's something people in the community can just pick up while they're out and about or at a restaurant or something.

So it's far different from "newspapers." Even still, I'm always looking for other jobs, as we're constantly having "scares." Though, they're more related to normal things like local businesses tightening up/closing thus, not advertising.
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post #13 of 14
4/4/09 at 1:19pm
I wonder if, as book readers become more commonplace, the newspapers could transition? They already have major papers available:

Quote:
# Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
# Top international newspapers from France, Germany, and Ireland; Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and The Irish Times—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
The papers ought to be pushing these devices in giant ads in their current paper forms I would think.
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post #14 of 14
4/5/09 at 5:41am
The far more interesting, and subsequently disturbing, question is not whether the newspaper survives, its who ll pay for expensive journalism, professional and not agenda-driven, in a world of "free" news.

A war correspondent in Iraq is expensive, a camera team even moreso. But if you expect to read your news from aggregator sites like HuffPo, you arent generating revenue, or at least very little, for the media.
In a heavily profit-orientied news business, good journalism just doesnt pay very well right now.
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