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The decline of newspaper revenues and circulation
- Thread starter Mark Roberts
- Start date
Totally agreed on your first point, Kelly. When the doors are open completely wide to what is considered "journalism", we get all sorts of misinformation disguised as 'news'. From Breitbart to OANN to the rest of them. I could see the start of this redefinition of "journalism" 8 years ago, when the digital "news site" thing seemed to take over. It seemed that anybody could publish anything and call it "news", and there were no gatekeepers. Even Woodward and Bernstein had gatekeepers: the WA Post chief editor and owner. Today there are less gatekeepers. That's a definite problem.
On your second point, The NY Times' relative success is good, it's a good sign for journalism, but it makes it sort of an outlier (it appears to be the top news website, according to Statista, 464 million monthly visits in December 2023 -- followed by CNN, Fox, and MSN). And as you said, it helps that it's a national paper with solid financial backing. But even the WA Post let go some people last year, the LA Times let go 110 people last year, and overall readership of newspapers (both print and online) has plummeted from 50 million in 2005 to around 10 million today. The one thing that the NY Times (and WA Post) have is national recognition, and with online reach, you don't have to look around for a kiosk that might carry those papers the same way that one did in 1989. So that's a plus.
I don't know what the answer is to the journalism mess, frankly. It may be that people will start supporting local news once and if they tire of the same national stuff, and maybe they smarten up to the potential misinformation one can get from TikTok being "news". A lot of local TV news is online stories now. Maybe we're just seeing the digital transformation of news and journalism in progress, and it may not shake out completely for another 10 years.
Here's a Fortune article the describes the state of newspapers late 2023, and it mentions the WA Post having to lay off / buy out 240 positions.:
America has lost one-third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its newspaper journalists since 2005 despite widespread outcry, study finds
At this rate, the country will hit 3,000 newspapers closed in two decades sometime next year, according to a Northwestern University study.
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I used to work in the backshop of a large suburban newspaper chain here in the Seattle area. It was where we did paste-up and then the papers were printed in another part of the building. There were maybe 25 to 30 of us in the building, and the rest of the chain probably had at least 10 people per paper in the five suburban papers owned by the chain (including stringers with some of the smaller papers). That's all long gone, probably replaced by Nextdoor neighborhood, or possibly local neighborhood forums, if there are any.
The other suburban chain that printed our college newspaper also had a big print operation, took the larger part of a warehouse sized building -- there were probably a similar number of people working at that chain as well. All gone.
No, not Nextdoor, but one or two 'major social media' platforms before that. ND is for people that can't tolerate FB, IG or TikTok.
When one of the anchors of the local TV news programs has a following of tens of thousands on major social platforms, you know that they're stories are short and sweet, but are also tied to 'watch us on TV to learn more' promotions.
Nothing wrong with that at all.
Well, for local news and events, Nextdoor seems to have more of it specific to my suburban area than the other social media. And the local metro news outlets seem to deal more with stories that affect the entire metro, or Seattle proper. The media that I see covering local suburban events the most is Nextdoor.
It might be different in other metros and regions.
Patch - Everything Local: Breaking News, Events, Discussions
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How about this one Patch and Hoodline have been presented to the public to fill the void suburban, in some larger cities and small town newspapers used to cover in the past.
Until I saw Knoxville, the list of two dozen places are some major metropolitan areas...those that would certainly be able to support advertising.
We do have a home-grown variant, but it's more in the traditional newsprint tradition (even though it is on-line)
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I'd heard of Patch. When I was on the local neighborhood association board (not an HOA, it was a city-derived neighborhood program) I think someone mentioned it for a way for people in the neighborhood to keep track of local events. I never checked it out, though. I think I found out about Nextdoor through the Neighborhood Association, though.Patch - Everything Local: Breaking News, Events, Discussions
The best breaking news, stories, and events from the Patch network of local news sites
Originally Reported, Hyperlocal Neighborhood News | Hoodline
Get breaking news from Hoodline's local reporters with stories to inform you about politics, weather, real estate, business, dining, crime, & more.
How about this one Patch and Hoodline have been presented to the public to fill the void suburban, in some larger cities and small town newspapers used to cover in the past.
When it was starting out in the San Francisco Bay Area, Nextdoor approached neighborhood associations to spread the word about it. My neighborhood association in Oakland, the city's largest, signed up. It was actually quite useful for several years. However, in the last two to three years, Nextdoor has cluttered the site with advertising - it's now so bad that you scroll past an ad only to see the same ad just two to four posts later; this approach drowns out other content. Nextdoor also went away from a strictly chronological feed to one that supposedly "drives engagement", meaning that you can't set aside a post that you've seen for future reference or follow-up because you may never find it ever again. For me, this methodology doesn't "drives engagement"; it drives me away. Nextdoor also got a somewhat bad reputation for posts that some interpreted as having racist insinuations. In my last year in Oakland, the site's Oakland outposts became filled with political screeds against the mayor and the Alameda County district attorney. And, yeah, they're both pretty awful, verging on incompetent. The DA now faces a recall election, organized in part via Nextdoor neighborhood sub-sites. Still, sometimes you just want to read something most directly relevant to your neighborhood and leave the political machinations to the activists, advocates, and similar grifters.
We did find that Nextdoor was a great place to place an ad to sell things when we needed to trim down a bit before our move to Colorado. No dollar outlay was involved. There's ad revenue a newspaper isn't getting.
Nextdoor for my Denver neighborhood is much quieter. I check it once or twice a month before the relentless, bad placement of ads drives me away again. It's even worse than long radio stopsets. I'm actually covered by two neighborhood associations here; neither makes much use of Nextdoor. Our elected officials seem to do a good job of communicating through email.
Patch has had, well, a patchy history. It's not everywhere and the business model has seemed shaky. I think it was part of Yahoo at one time.
PS: Did you know that Nextdoor headquarters are in the building that housed KPO/KNBC/KNBR from 1942-1967 at 420 Taylor in San Francisco (Taylor & O'Farrell)?
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It's a heavy industrial process, no doubt about it. Composition was heavy industry at one time too, with Linotype machines whose operators required immense amounts of skill. Since a Linotype is literally an on-the-fly type foundry, I'm sure there was plenty of lead exposure, too. Computers and photocomp dealt a blow to the Linotype-operator trade, though smaller newspapers, especially weeklies, were forced to go to "cold type" approaches as early as the mid-1960s because there was simply a shortage of Linotype operators, who were scooped up by big-city papers. The beneficial side effect was that copy could be typeset faster - first, a little bit faster, then much faster. A Linotype machine fed by paper tape could set maybe 10 lines a minute. A Compugraphic Videosetter - admittedly a top-of-the-line model from the latter half of the 1970s - could set 450. Then desktop publishing came along after 1985 with even faster speeds and greater capabilities than available before.
Yet, the presses remained, even while using a different technology, and the costs of maintaining that overhead have become increasingly burdensome. One of my hometown papers in Missouri still has its own printing plant. That paper has been swallowed up within the Gannett empire. I've heard tell that the presses keep breaking down, and the local paper may have to start being printed in either Des Moines or Peoria, each more than four hours away, via routes that have some two-lane roads remaining. And that Missouri city doesn't have the best air service, so air shipment probably isn't an economically reasonable option.
I worked briefly for a "paste-up" shop in 2000 and it was an eye-opener. The newspaper industry even way back then had moved on to Quark and InDesign and direct composition.
It was good to see how it was done back in the day with dummy sheets, pica poles and proportion wheels, but only for an historical perspective because that method was labor-intensive to say the least.
It was good to see how it was done back in the day with dummy sheets, pica poles and proportion wheels, but only for an historical perspective because that method was labor-intensive to say the least.
When I was doing paste-up it was in-between the old school ways and computerization phases. It didn't take much more time to paste up a printed story on graph paper than it does to manipulate all the stuff in a word processer, at least when I took a class in desktop publishing in 2007, which included inserting photos and captions, wraparounds, and the like. My stint in papers was 1981.
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Agreed on Nextdoor. I think -- at least here in the NW -- they've installed AI to monitor use of language, and sometimes posts get taken down, or closed to further comments. I've also noticed that it's difficult to recheck on a post because of the way that the feed is set up.
As you mentioned, there are quite a few ads, which doesn't bother me as much as the fact that the ads slow down the loading of the site. And, yeah, they repeat a lot.
Yes and the 420 Taylor Street offices used to have the former KBHK-TV/ KPYX-TV studios there in 1984.
This is bad. Three papers I look at, and probably my Charlotte Observer, had a "normal" front page today, which means that if there is a headline, it won't be in a real paper because tomorrow is Saturday.
Two other papers I get to see as they actually are, with my library card, have the giant headline people want to keep and the entire front page devoted to one story, with several entire pages inside.
Two other papers I get to see as they actually are, with my library card, have the giant headline people want to keep and the entire front page devoted to one story, with several entire pages inside.
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Here's another one if we are wondering how op-eds land on local and national News outlets its coming from these places like Creators Syndicate, Andrews McMeel, Tribune Content agency, Cagle and King Features. In past examples local newspapers had to pay royalties to these print syndicators to get readers to their publication how that plays out today it now a combination of the syndication content companies having to boost readers directly to their publication and or pay local news outlet paywall to have access to the op eds.