The fate of print journalism is a regular topic around here, because my brother is a reporter for a small paper in upstate New York. Also, for a short time, I considered making a switch from academia to journalism. That's like bailing out of the Titanic to get a lift on the Hindenburg.
Megan pointed to some gruesome figures about the top 25 Daily Newspapers. Megan's probably right. Those 25 papers will probably be whittled down to 3 in the next few years.
The very local papers, like the one my brother works for, will most likely still be around. Their circulation rates have stayed constant. The Internet hasn't replaced local papers yet. There are very few successful, hyperlocal blogs and websites – none that would replace the regional paper.
Part of me, the dark part of me that eats with her mouth open, wonders whether or not it matters. Sure, it's bad that smart, talented people can't find work, but I'm not exactly starving for good things to read. I can barely keep up with what I've got.
The Cleveland Plain-Dealer is number 16 on the Daily Newspaper list. It's not a very good newspaper. It's mostly ads and wire stories. What original content they have is thin and boring. Ohio needs excellent coverage of politics in their cities and in the state capital, but it doesn't need reporters giving them original stories on home and garden. People get their sports and entertainment and national news elsewhere. The only thing we need from the Plain Dealer is coverage of state and local affairs. I wonder if they would be more viable, if they reduced their mission.
Apt. 11d 
Thanks to one stubborn rich guy and one long-time media owning family, we’ve still got two dailies, though I was disappointed to see that neither was a top 25 paper. While one could fail, the history of lawsuits and whatnot are such that a merger would likely be impossible. And the stubborn rich guy owns the profitable (they say), local suburban papers.
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“It’s mostly ads and wire stories. What original content they have is thin and boring.”
This is what frustrates me the most with my own local paper. I did a study and found out that 46% of the content in the main section of the paper was adds!
I don’t want to read the paper because I don’t want to pay money for someone to advertise to me.
Boring.
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The top headline on Google News as I type is “Obama To Name ‘Smart Grids’ Projects,” from the Wall Street Journal. This seems like a real news story that newspapers should be covering. Below it is a link to a similar story in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Associated Press. Below that is a link to “all 595 news articles.”
Below that is the latest Israeli/Palestinian news and a link to “all 1,750 news articles.”
Those are huge inefficiencies and there is no reason that we should “fix” this problem by trying to save hundreds or thousands of places to print the exact same news story.
The newspaper industry has become like the television networks — if there were 2,000 TV networks and they were all showing the exact same shows in prime time, and the same three soap operas during the day, and the only differences were the locations of the fires on the 6:00 and 11:00 news shows.
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This reminds me that the Post Gazette is trying to get people to subscribe to PG+ for $3/month in exchange for special on-line content (and coupons). It’s like the second collection at Mass. I feel a vague sense that I should give, but I can never remember what it was supposed to be for.
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Our local newspaper is trying to lure children into the newspaper habit with 17 cent classroom subscriptions.
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We have some excellent hyper-local news blogs, in our neck of the woods. They don’t quite fill the niche of reporting about city-wide issues (i.e. political offices, school board, schools, etc.). But, they link the news in even more specifically to specific neighborhoods in the city, and rely on local advertisers & reader generated information (though two or more journalists run the site and write the articles).
I think print news is dying, and that it will all die eventually, with the exception of a few “national newspapers” that will be more like national news magazines (but I’m not certain about them, yet, however much I’d like the NYT & WashPost to survive).
The locals will become advertising circulars, rather than newspapers (lots of advertising, a little tiny bit of content).
What’s killing the big guys first is that they’re trying to remain what they were (i.e. the Tribune, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Plain-Dealer were all players, real newspapers. They’re hoping they can make it into the “national category” but aren’t succeeding, but burning to the ground while they try).
(And, no, I know nothing about the newspaper business, except that I’m a consumer of news)
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The Tribune got nailed the same way 100 other businesses got nailed, somebody paid too much for it and cannot service the debt with even a slight drop in revenue. That’s a separate problem.
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Well, yeah, the Tribune story is another bit of ugliness in the saga of funds/borrowing/and destroying companies. I’m generally a free market enthusiast, but, I am *not* happy with some of the financial tools that have become popular in the last decade or so.
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“The locals will become advertising circulars, rather than newspapers (lots of advertising, a little tiny bit of content).”
I think our local paper has value for its coverage of high school sports, etc., but as far as I can tell after two years, it’s totally in the tank for the local establishment. This is most visible in the way the paper uncritically pushes even the most improbable downtown development, for instance lofts. Without giving away our exact location, I can’t properly express exactly how ridiculous this idea is, but I’ll just say that $200 a square foot for downtown lofts is really pushing it in an area where $100 per square foot is top dollar for new single-family homes. I haven’t devoted a lot of effort to studying the local paper, but there are some dogs that don’t bark. One of the hot local controversies is that a hospital formerly located in the middle of a mostly poor city neighborhood has pulled up stakes and relocated. The online paper has a special section on the move with at least a dozen cheerleading articles, and as far as I can tell, not one article on the impact on the neighborhood left behind.
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This is not anybody’s Johnson, but it does contain an obscenity that is remarkable only for the source and formatting. I didn’t believe it when I saw it, but I found it again on the California web site.
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