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The decline of newspaper revenues and circulation

2008 was a big turning point for newspaper revenue because that was about the time the economy started to drop. If you remember real-estate tanked, property values dropped and everybody became concerned about the future. It was natural for print to start to loose business. Yes social media was rising at the time but as I remember ad sales in general through all mediums was dropping in 2008. The drop triggered big changes in the operation of newspapers including those down here in SW Florida. A very impressive local paper owned by a national company who had invested millions in a new building and new press just before 2008 because things were so good sold to another national chain who then sold to a third chain in less than a year. Big changes occurred. The paper dropped employees sold the press moved printing to a central location North and content suffered. Less local stories and more national and regional stories that could be adapted to appear to be local. In a year the number of local stories in a Sunday edition dropped to eight then six. The size of the paper decreased and the great local reporting for the most part went away. I'm of the belief that the loss of content was as big a contributor to the demise as was the advertising money available. Radio went through the same thing at the same time.
 
I don't mind waiting because I'm in the habit of actually reading the paper as much as a week later ever since I went through the previous week's papers during college. I still do that with the actual Charlotte Observer I get delivered to select articles (usually just obituaries these days) or photos I want to keep. Then I read the papers after that. But it's annoying that news that happened on Monday is reported on Wednesday.

To relate this to broadcasting, the entire WBTV 6:00 newscast, which I record for the weather but might watch if there's an interesting story, was the death of four police officers. WCNC has "Jeopardy" at 7 but my recording started with the end of their 6:00 newscast which pre-empted the network news. Not one word in the next day's Charlotte Observer.
 
There is (was?) something to be said for a lot of news in one eye-ball full....especially during a meal alone. One could glance over the titles, read the first line or two, or the whole article without doing a thing other than occasionally turning the page. Now I get bacon grease on my smart phone display. :p

When I subscribed to the electronic version of a major city's daily up until recently, I would choose the version of display that showed me the whole page of the 'paper' so I could do the same.

Note the past tense on subscription. When it went to something like 25 bucks a month, I was gone. Not worth it. Add up your monthly / yearly online-related subscriptions sometime.....Google storage, Dropbox, app subscriptions, weather subscriptions, Netflix, Hulu, sports channels, and many, many more. It's a lot of money and I'm on a quest to just pay for what I really want.
 
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