Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

After being published for nearly 150 years, the Seattle Post Intelligencer is ending production of its print edition next week. Other papers including the Rocky Mountain News and Tuscon Citizen have also met similar fates.

Though Seattle, Denver and Tuscon still have daily papers, the NY Times is predicting that it’s only a matter of time before some major cities in America are left without any prominent local newspaper at all.

Joel Kramer, an editor and publisher in the newspaper business says that:

It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting. Places like [online news sites] would spring up but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.

To make matters worse, many of the top papers in big cities including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Haven Register are owned by companies that have already filed for bankruptcy. Many other large papers have been put up for sale, but there haven’t been any buyers so far.

Newspapers have been struggling financially because their main source of income, based on ad revenues, has shrunk by 25 percent in just the last two years. Some of the slide is directly related to the popularity of classifieds sites like Craigslist and the other contributing factor has been the recession.

In the last 20 years, the daily print circulation of U.S. newspapers has dropped from 62 million to 49 million. In comparison, the number of online news readers keeps climbing, now with 75 million Americans.

Newspapers are cutting down on the amount of times per week that they publish new editions, as well as going completely digital in some circumstances not because they want to, but because they have no choice. “It’s not so much that everyone has a great plan. Everybody is so desperate, they’re looking at every possibility,” said John Yemma of the Christian Science Monitor.

From MediaPost:

In the hyper-targeted media world, the sweet spot is often local. To tap that potential, NBC Local Media has launched Neighborhood News Pages, available in nine O&O markets, including seven in the top 10. The sites, which aggregate news from NBC’s local TV affiliates as well as the Web, then organize the information by neighborhood. Topics covered include news, sports, health, around town, weather and traffic.

The local markets represented are: WNBC New York, KNBC Los Angeles, WMAQ Chicago, WCAU Philadelphia, KNTV San Francisco, KXAS Dallas-Ft. Worth, WRC Washington, D.C., KNDS San Diego and KTIS Hartford. The news pages were built and launched by Outside.in, a data and technology platform that creates and distributes hyperlocal news.

“Our new Locals Only sites enable our users to be true insiders and to fulfill on that promise we need to deepen our coverage in local communities,” says Brian Buchwald, senior vice president, local integrated media for NBC. He notes that the NNP allows the network to “add entirely new sections of content to our sites and create more targeted ad impressions at a fraction of the cost.”

“Publishers can use our Neighborhood News Pages to create thousands of discrete, highly targeted local news pages to complement their national and regional coverage,” adds Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in. “Outside.in covers all local blogs, mainstream media and twitter streams. If it’s about local, we’ve got it.”

Both national and local ads appear on Neighborhood News Pages. The owned-and-operated sales team sells ads for the sites, in addition to NBC’s national sales team.

Lois Whitman. Pic via TechCrunch

It’s amazing how some things never change. This article from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch is bouncing around Twitter and it concerns one Lois Whitman. In fact the article is headlined – Meet Lois Whitman, The Poster Child For Everything Wrong With PR. Apparently Lois works for HWH, a PR firm and she’s been pissing off some people. Consider this from Michael – “Lois is one of the most obnoxious PR people you’ll ever meet, and the poster child for everything that is wrong with the industry.” and this – “Lois takes pleasure in making people miserable, and her specialty is spamming.” It’s a fun read..it proves that some institutions have not embraced the idea of two-way communications at all. Or it only proves that Lois and her ilk are heading the way of the dinosaurs.

As Michael says regarding HWH’s client list – “You are supposed to hire these people because they have relationships with the media, not because they know how to effectively spam and are verbally abusive.”

Found on Twitter from @Julie Ma.