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The continuing decline of newspapers

The only time that newspapers are relevant is when a sports team in the 4 major sports win a championship. For example the Inquirer and Daily News had special editions of the paper after the Eagles won the Super Bowl and a day after the parade. The only thing was that it cost 4 dollars per paper, instead of the usual 2 dollars.
 
TheBigA said:
Plus the collapse of classified ads.
Click to expand...

I remember when The Pennysaver was quite a big deal. People would wait for it to come weekly
and then read it from cover to cover. Not so much today. Just some pizza coupons and help wanted
ads from places you would not want to work anyway.

Craigslist killed it. They do run a clever ad campaign trying to overcome this.
A guy with a flummoxed look on his face over the caption "I have no idea who Craig is,
but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be on his list!"
 
FreddyE1977 said:
I remember when The Pennysaver was quite a big deal. People would wait for it to come weekly
and then read it from cover to cover. Not so much today. Just some pizza coupons and help wanted
ads from places you would not want to work anyway.

Craigslist killed it. They do run a clever ad campaign trying to overcome this.
A guy with a flummoxed look on his face over the caption "I have no idea who Craig is,
but I'm pretty sure I don't want to be on his list!"
Click to expand...

Here in Southington, Connecticut we had something similar called The Step Saver. Eventually they merged it into their co-owned weekly paper The Southington Observer. They also have The Bristol Observer and Plainville Observer.
 
I just talked to the person who could reduce the cost of my subscription. I paid about $220 last year after talking to someone. The bill said $270 but I was able to get a reduction to $244. I did point out I don't even use the web site, but I don't think that made a difference. But so much has been removed from The Charlotte Observer over the past year. There used to be an entire page devoted to religion (including a church directory with paid ads), which used to be an entire section that had the comics and TV listings along with celebrity news and such. Now, the church directory is half of a page with national and world news on it. Celebrity news was moved some years ago to a page which had the weather. Now that is gone, along with "this day in history" and birthdays of famous people. The weather information on longer has a national map. There was once a Home section before changes in 2015. Now there is a tabloid section with information about real estate. Gardening and a couple of other items in the Home section were on a page that has disappeared. I don't know where gardening even is, but it is advertised that there is such a feature. Not that I really care about gardening. My grandparents did but I haven't tried to keep where they worked looking good. There was an automotive classifieds section with a review of a new car, advice about taking care of your car, and often a story about a classic car. That is now one page in sports, plus a map, and no reviews or stories. There was an entire business page where articles were often continued. Lately it is half a page with the rest being advertising. There used to be two editorial pages each days with syndicated columnists on one of the pages. Now it is one page except on Sunday, with someone local if we're lucky and maybe one local editorial, and on Saturday most of the page is devoted to national cartoons and quotes from the late-night talk show hosts.
 
semoochie said:
Any thoughts as to when it might get to "buggy-whip" status?
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Like everything, it depends on the paper. Certainly the big ones, like the NY Times and Wash Post have diversified their revenue streams and their content creation so they aren't strictly relying on printing presses. Companies like Cox and Gannett are doing online video just like everyone else. But there are still some local papers whose approach hasn't changed since Ben Franklin.
 
TheBigA said:
It's a downward spiral. You pay less, so they have less money for reporters to cover the news.
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I pay less? No, I keep paying more every year. I'll bet a lot of people don't try to talk them down.

And now I am blocked from any articles at all on the News & Record web site. I had it all figured out: go to enough libraries and limit how many articles I see at home with those papers that won't let me see more articles because I use in-private browsing or whatever it is called on whichever browser. I hadn't even seen any articles yet today when I got blocked. Here's the thing: at the libraries that subscribe, I don't have time to read the articles. All I do is list the ones I haven't already seen or copied online. If I wanted to keep the text, it's cheaper not to make Xerox copies, which are almost never the right shape to be worth copying. And the Winston-Salem Journal is co-owned, so I could run into the same thing there. NewsBank is not available at every library.
 
I had an uncle that worked for a major city daily (in fact it was a morning and evening edition into the 1960s). He said the Sunday paper, even then, lost money. All those syndicated features (comics, TV Guides, things like Parade Magazine, Dear Abby and other syndicated columnists) cost more than all the advertising, inserts and premium price. So many big city papers have cut the syndicated features ad then cut staff to the bone. The dailies keep getting smaller and smaller.

I know some small town publishers who say some stuff doesn't get printed because they can't sell enough ads to meet their revenue/content ratios. Even so, it's the small towns where the local paper is likely the only place to get local news that have not seen the huge slide in revenue and/or readership. Even they have become creative by doing special publications for the area at certain times (season stuff like for hunters, tourist season, etc.). Some have resorted to publishing a phone book! Ironically, most of these publishers use companies to print their publications because to do so in-house is more costly. That includes business printing like forms, stationary and business cards...all farmed out.
 
Newspaper costs are amazingly high. One publisher I know prints 1,000 of the 8 page paper. Printing and postage alone run $650 per issue. The issue price is 50 cents, a loss of 15 cents per copy that is made up with advertising. Even an annual subscription is $30, $2.50 below the actual printing and postage cost. The philosophy is raise prices and fewer subscribe or buy at the retail outlet, raising the cost. There is the set up on the 8 pages that is there whether they print 1, 1,000 or 10,000. Dividing set up charges by subscribers is the key. The more that buy, even at a loss, the better the chances you can sell the advertising to cover the loss and pay yourself a salary up to a point. So, if $200 of that $500 is set up, 1,000 copies is $500 but 2,000 is $800. 500 copies is $350 and 100 copies is $230.
 
The family next door had three kids who all played sports from their pre-teens through college (they all won scholarships). There was one small daily paper in our area that covered the local sports world including club sports and high school. They subscribed to that paper simply to get the news on their kid's schools and that of their competition. Once the last kid graduated from high school the paper stopped.

We moved to CA from AZ (for one year) in 1988. Prior to the move I subscribed to the large daily here in Phoenix which had the news you didn't get on TV. Behind the scene detail from the TV headlines. Once I returned to Phoenix I didn't restart the paper again because, as Chimpanzee noted, a lot of the content had vanished. I bought a couple of audio books so the Parakeets would have something to listen to since their cage liners didn't have printing on it any longer.
 
Coverage of prep sports is one area in which local papers can differentiate themselves. As b-turner noted, the fixed costs are high as are the variable costs of printing each issue. The business model was supported by classified and commercial advertising. The decline really is a shame because most of the investigative reporting which has resulted in real improvement has mostly come from local papers. Informing people about the corruption of former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is one example. The Detroit Free Press led the way on that.
 
The Myrtle Beach Sun News announced it would no longer cover high school games. That's hard to believe, but they don't have the staff. I know The Charlotte Observer would get stories from people with the title "correspondent" who didn't actually work for the paper.
 
Correspondents are the lifeblood of many papers. For their efforts they typically get a free subscription. Some have weekly columns. At one point, the paper was in most every household. Now that might be under 10% of homes for a daily and maybe 25% in a small town. The correspondent got a bit of 'fame' for their writing and sometimes it might even help their business is they owned one. These days those contributors are becoming harder to find. Nobody needs the paper to create a following online. The paper is no longer 'special' in that respect.

If the Myrtle Beach Sun News was smart, they'd be talking to journalism departments at the schools and suggesting students provide the stories and photos. If not the students, perhaps the booster clubs will make sure they get the stories and photos to the paper. I can understand a staff being cut to the bone, having somehow chosen the small market stations that had zero budget for anything (except maybe toilet paper). You can still do quite a bit by getting others in the community to help you out. In fact, at one little station we got the head coach to phone in a 5 minute sports and high school sports report at 7:15 weekday mornings. We paid him $5 a show and sold the exclusive sponsorship for $80 a week. He was the head of the athletic department and a real sports fan in general so he was perfect for this.
 
b-turner said:
If the Myrtle Beach Sun News was smart, they'd be talking to journalism departments at the schools and suggesting students provide the stories and photos. If not the students, perhaps the booster clubs will make sure they get the stories and photos to the paper.
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Sounds like a lot of outsourcing to me. Then you turn into a print version of YouTube. How do you handle it when the paper gets sued or challenged about facts? In Seattle, the top-rated station is owned by the University of Washington. Now its reporters have unionized. How do you handle that?
 
I suppose any of that could happen but I have never heard of it happening in small population centers. When you have one or two high schools in your coverage people tend to love how inclusive your media is and a school appreciates the opportunity for the students. Naturally it is not unfiltered...approved by the journalism department head and newspaper editor. Unionize? I guess that might happen. The Myrtle Beach Sun is a daily, owned by a group owner and has 40,000 or so subscribers. Maybe the Union would see a benefit from such a relatively small operation but I'd suspect it would be the group owner's entire holdings they'd be interested in since the membership gain would be ample enough to make the effort worth it.

The station where we put the head coach on was in a county of 40,000 and it was the only high school in town. There were just 5 of us on staff with two part time high school kids. And you are right, it is a lot of outsourcing. To keep them all on board you had to talk with them regularly to keep them interested. Overall, these outsourced groups held themselves to a high standard. We had a bunch of groups on. We never had to have a talk with them about any problems their content created. I figured there'd be problems with high school kids calling games but we had a guy that used to call games that taught and airchecked them. They really took it seriously and did about as well as any adult we'd hire to call the game. My boss even let the kids sell the sponsorships (that we produced and ran from the studio). We donated back 50%. We provided equipment and the board-op at the studio, they took care of the rest. One of kids told me they were told to never say anything negative about the other team and not to criticize a referee call. He said that would get him booted out. The school administration understood the importance of the kid's involvement making a good impression.
 
Another problem affecting high school sports coverage by smaller dailies is the trend toward outsourcing production to a larger paper that still owns a press. Since the big paper has priority, the smaller papers often have to deal with early deadlines. So while the big paper can wait until 11:00 to get that crucial high school football night game in, one of the smaller papers being printed at its plant may have a 9:00 or 9:30 deadline. If the game starts at 7:30, it won't be over by 9:30, meaning the game story will have to run online only as first-day news and either be reprinted in the paper two days after the game or not run in the paper at all and be replaced by a second-day analysis/feature story instead.
 
TheBigA said:
Sounds like a lot of outsourcing to me. Then you turn into a print version of YouTube. How do you handle it when the paper gets sued or challenged about facts? In Seattle, the top-rated station is owned by the University of Washington. Now its reporters have unionized. How do you handle that?
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I remember from nearly 60 years back that the Traverse City, MI, Record Eagle had "stringers" in Leland, Suttons Bay and Northport, MI. Each of these was a community of less than 1000 and the stringers essentially called in anything newsworthy and then the paper verified with the police or fire department or other authorities.

This was the only way a paper based in what was a town of 20,000 could cover the whole area which had many, many of those small towns and where, during winter, sending a reporter was not efficient or even possible at times.

I suppose you could call those stringers "tipsters" since the paper did verify all stories. But the system worked well in the pre-internet days.
 
CTListener said:
Another problem affecting high school sports coverage by smaller dailies is the trend toward outsourcing production to a larger paper that still owns a press. Since the big paper has priority, the smaller papers often have to deal with early deadlines. So while the big paper can wait until 11:00 to get that crucial high school football night game in, one of the smaller papers being printed at its plant may have a 9:00 or 9:30 deadline. If the game starts at 7:30, it won't be over by 9:30, meaning the game story will have to run online only as first-day news and either be reprinted in the paper two days after the game or not run in the paper at all and be replaced by a second-day analysis/feature story instead.
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That's what happened with the Myrtle Beach paper. And there are at least ten high schools just in the county where the paper is located, and it has subscribers in three counties. A couple of other papers cover news in part of the county.
 
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