Downsizing Newspapers: No End in Sight
Friday, March 13th, 2009
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.
