Can Newspapers Survive?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under New Media
Newspapers across the country are feeling crunched. The price of ink and paper has gone up, so has the cost of delivery, and they aren’t being helped by the decrease of subscribers. Not to mention that Craigslist is eating all of their revenues from Classified ads, and local businesses are spending more advertising dollars online, in television, and on the radio.
We’re hearing news about the San Francisco Chronicle losing $1 million a week, and it’s sister paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has gone online only, ceasing it’s print edition. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver has disappeared entirely.
We already know that in this age of television and the internet, that the days of the newspapers were numbered. Back during the Nixon administration, they had to develop “Joint Operating Agreements,” so that newspapers in markets with multiple dailies could survive. The trouble all started as far back as the 60s.
My family recently cancelled our subscription to the local paper. It’s not because we get our news from the internet or the TV, it’s because the newspaper sucked. It would constantly have misspellings and bad grammar, and it never had any real news. One morning, the entire front page was dedicated to a cat that had been stolen by some middle schoolers. This was, keep in mind, while their was a war in Iraq, Afghanistan, our financial system was crumbling, and the 2008 U.S. Presidential election was still in full swing.
Can newspapers survive if they are going online only? The Seattle P.I. has a good following, and is well respected by people. But the dinky little local in my neck of the woods, can they survive? With the kind of stories they are printing, probably not.
Another question I’m wondering about is, are people attached to the physical paper that is delivered to their tube every day? Is there a fundamental problem with reading your news online? I mean, when you read your news online, you can sort through all the stories, only read the stuff you’re interested in, and you can get news from multiple sources around the world.
My dad reads our local paper, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, and the Deseret News during his lunch break at work (We live in Maine, we used to live in Seattle, and before that, Utah). Do we really need to waste all those trees and print our news on paper every day?
