Most Endangered US Papers
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Following the demise of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver just under two weeks ago, Time Magazine came up with a list of the 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. The forecast points to web-only publishing for the papers allegedly facing the axe. Where do the journos who take buy-outs go?
The threat of the “one horse town” scenario has been around for nearly a decade. I can remember discussions going on at SND annuals about consolidating titles – when I was at the SND annual in Minneapolis back in 2000, the Seattle Post and the Seattle Intelligencer had just merged. Now they’re under the axe – here’s a NYT.com article from January forecasting its demise. Other papers were looking at a similar fate, or worse (getting shut-down completely).
Ten years ago, the threat was moving at glacial speeds. Now papers in the US are at the abyss, and the Global Financial Crisis is the boot, or the gun, that’s pushing so many titles over. I wonder, can America live with the prospect of on-line delivery only? What happens to those who don’t have a computer to get their news? Is TV going to deliver the same analysis-driven contextual news that those ten titles listed by Time did so well (remember, they’re not getting shut down because of poor reporting performance, it’s all got to do with advertising revenue)? Is a one-print-paper town going to be serviced fairly and accurately, and are all readers’ interests going to be addressed? In a two-paper-town scenario, one could rely on having two titles in competition resulting in competition to deliver fair and accurate news – in short, they kept each other honest. Can people trust in just one newspaper?
Here in Australia, newspapers are just starting to admit to huge losses in advertising revenue. All papers have an online version, and two years ago, Fairfax started up an online-only daily in Brisbane in an effort to show some competition to Newsltd.’s dominance of the market with two daily titles. I wonder, what next for Australia? This year alone, Rupert Murdoch, chair of News Corp., which runs Newsltd., posted a US 6.4 (AUD 9.8) billion dollar loss. Will our economy hold a little stronger than the US, or are we just a 6 month lag behind our best buddy, America?
One Comment
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June 9th, 2009 at 10:30 amPersonally i agreed what you have commented on the disadvantages of online newspaper.
In fact, we can’t have only online newspaper by replacing traditional newspaper.People will soon lost the meaning of live, everything just Internet and where is our fun of being a human being anymore.
My suggestion for some newspaper company can actually propose some special deals to encourage company to do more advertisement on their papers. Firstly i think we can focus more on Retailers, we all know many of us are buying take-home with this economy situation, therefore retailer actually more some increamental of sales. They are so-called have more capital to invest and of course boost the newspaper company P&L.
Secondly, maybe they should work together with human resource dept to helping people find jobs via their newspaper. This way actually create some sort of deman on the newspaper, maybe can become a selling point to those company who wanted to enlarge their business during down turn.