Another newspaper is circling the bowl — this time, the Tucson Citizen, the smaller of the two papers in that Arizona city. Gannett says it will croak the 139-year-old paper on March 21, just past the vernal equinox, if a buyer is not found. Good luck with that. On the block with the Citizen are the Rocky Mountain News, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and God knows how many other venerable fish-wrappers as the decline in circulation not only continues, but accelerates.
The Boston Globe is lopping off heads in the newsroom, as are the Casper Star-Tribune and Billings Gazette. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, meanwhile, has filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition.
New York Magazine is taking a different tack, informing its core writing staff that their paychecks will be getting a little skinnier, a concept that I expect to quickly gain traction with publishers nationwide, if it hasn’t already.
Interestingly, New York is also reducing its use of free-lancers like yours truly, a trend that will not please folks like Eric Butterman, who with JournalismJobs.com teaches an online course on free-lance pitching and writing. I find this tactic slightly surprising, considering what a bargain free-lancers are, providing as we do our own hardware and software, office space, health care and retirement accounts. But then I was shocked when my buddy Hal, another free-lancer, got the hook at The Pueblo Chieftain. Good and cheap do not always reside in the same person, but they did in his case.
Still, if you have any staff left, it must be cheaper to squeeze ’em like a nearly flat tube of toothpaste than it is to hire a free-lancer, no matter how reasonably priced he or she is. If the person thus squeezed runs completely dry, well, there’s a line of the poor sonsabitches stretching down the block and around the corner. Pick one, any one, if you have any budget left. Squeeze, discard, repeat.
Hal and I have been trying to figure out what the future of newspapers might look like, and Hal has suggested that a functional model might blend a frequently updated, hard-news website with a free, once-a-week hard-copy edition, perhaps published on Thursdays, focusing on opinion, analysis and what’s happening on the weekend. It sounds something like this vision of the upmarket newspaper from Philip Meyer, published last fall in American Journalism Review.
But then you’re still dealing with all that old-media dreck, like newsprint, printing presses and circulation, plus an online audience conditioned to getting everything for free. So I remain unconvinced, despite Bryan Appleyard’s witty take: “(T)he only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.”
What’s your take on the Newspaper 2.0? Leave your thoughts in comments.
Mad Blog Media 
Here in Chicago, we have not one but two free (or nearly so) weekday papers (at least we did last time I checked), each run by one of our major Newspapers.
I rarely picked them up, because they were the similar to the one your friend mentions, and that doesn’t much interest me. I admit, I am not much of a newspaper reader, I generally get my news from the radio.
Poor trees. The hairless apes finally decide to stop cutting them down to make fish wrappers, and then the pine beetles take over the job of offing them.
I wonder… have We The People ever really given a rat’s ass about knowing the truth? Go back to the Founding Fathers, Abe the Emancipator, the Spanish-American War, The War to End All Wars and all of the wars that came after it… We have eaten up steaming piles of bullshit served up fresh daily, and for every great truth that a newspaper has shed light upon, it has helped to obfuscate a dozen others and outright lie about an equal amount.
Which is a reflection of ourselves and not the institution of reporting or journalism, and not unique to the newspaper industry. We are only a smidgeon more intelligent with our tree-dwelling relatives, and sometimes I wonder about even that.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
And trying to figure out what we want is about as scientific an endeavor as reading sheep entrails. We won’t pay a dime for anything on Al Gore’s interwebs, but we’ll pay left, right, and center for anything delivered via our cell phone. What’s that? You want a buck for a piece of shit recording of the first seven notes of a song that I hated in the ’70s? Sure! Help yourself to my checking account!
So maybe the future of newspapers is that it’s 99% online, and the only hardcopies left out there are advertising disguised as a news delivery service.
Maybe a free flier shoved into your plastic sack at King Soopers, with a couple of headlines and a bunch of ads for the crap in the adjacent strip mall.
Maybe they will only exist in airports, coffee shops, and hotels, where folks are stuck somewhere and have some time to kill. Cut out the big print plants and print them out in the lobby of the facility in which they will be consumed, kind of like the Otis Spunkmeyer model.
Anyone got a sheep we can gut?
I thought that was a member of Molly Hatchet sitting at that computer until I read the caption! Are you sure you don’t play guitar or bass and sing ‘Whiskey Man’ in the shower?
Avast!
Been there done that(Nov. & Dec.)…next item please, ye skirvy Dog!
ARGH!
Good Lord, Man! Halloween has long since gone. Did you have to scare us like that?
Me? I like my news delivered by chicas with surgically enhanced attributes. They deliver the news with such gravitas. Besides, I don’t/can’t read. My attention span is only good for 10, maybe 15 seconds tops. When I talk about serious topics with my friends, I depend on sound bytes, hearsay, rumor, and AM talk radio.
I’ll be the first to admit that I know nothing of the journalism business, or what’s left of it, but why isn’t there growth in the business of gathering the news that many portal web sites are distributing? I get a lot of my news from Yahoo, so to take a look at where they get their news, it turns out that it is mostly from wire services (AP, Reuters) and a couple of select web sites. If Yahoo is doing very well attracting readers to its site by distributing this news, is there an opportunity here for those in the business of gathering the news? Perhaps these portals are getting their news too cheap?
Of course, none of this addresses the problem with local newspapers, but since my local paper is the Grand Junction Daily Senial, I’ve long since given up on quality local news. Too bad, too, since our local government is pretty damn corrupt.
Wow, Patrick. I haven’t seen computers that old since my master’s thesis work. Did those have a crank start on the back?
Half asleep listening to public radio this morning and there is the Exec. Editor of a D.C. paper (sorry, the title didn’t sink in) being interviewed. He says that he built up a huge newsroom “so now there is room to shrink it” (ahem–any volunteers for the decimation?) and they are just now merging their web and hard copy resources. Why would one need separate reporters/writers/editors to begin with? Different layout staff and the guys at the printing presses, I suppose.
If I had to pay to get the NY Times online I’d do it and guess they have to figure out how to make more revenue from those ad boxes too. Its sure nice to have that on line.
Also, there is no one standard here. The New Mexican is a mediocre paper but is free online. The Albuquerque Journal is a better paper but costs money online. So I get the free one during the week when I do a quick scan and buy the print Journal on those days when I actually take time to read it front to back. Sure, I get what I pay for. But if the papers don’t have a consistent way of wringing money out of me then I’ll find away around paying. Back before the Web, I had subscriptions to print news all the time.
I think this is one of those big paradigm shifts slowly (and now not so slowly) hitting us, much as machines replaced human labor a century or so ago. Who knows what the future will look like, but I suspect future kids won’t have as many printed copy paperboy jobs. Maybe we won’t even have online news. Just chips from the paper of our choice embedded somewhere in our cerebral cortex. Load the news in as we sleep.
I better make coffee. I’m babbling senselessly and besides, the cat is biting my foot and demanding to be fed.
I wonder whether we even need “journalism” anymore. As Steve notes, we’re more interested in “American Idol” than American history, and as Jeff observes, TV has given us a 15-second attention span and a mania for 15 minutes of fame to go with it.
Cycling coverage is merely sports coverage, and in many cases it falls well short of the treatment a third-rate college soccer team gets from its local TV station. But we’re already seeing teams, events and racers bypassing us altogether by providing their own streaming video, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. The middleman — and whatever expert interpretation of raw data he or she may be able to provide — is gradually being pushed out of the line between athlete and audience. If you can follow Lance Armstrong on Twitter or befriend his foundation guy on Facebook, do you really need a VeloNews?
I guess we’ll find out, and probably sooner rather than later. Gonna be an interesting year.
I haven’t read any print but the Washington Post for years (with the condition of our local rag, what else is there?) and listening to KRCC for every thing else.
Dude, the future of newspapers? Look no farther than Industrial Information Resources. I think its IIR.com. Our company shells out big bucks (and I mean big) and its worth every penny. Check it out. Base your model on that.
And Velonews? I like them better that the Twitter-Facebook direct route because they offer the breadth I want. BUT they suffer the same myopia that most newspapers do, covering what is in front of them. They don’t do stories about the following, which came from a conversation last night with a relative of mine: Why is the insurance fee going from $2 to $3? Answer: probably two lawsuits. One by Gerard Bisceglia, the other by the female MTB racer who got screwed over in the Olympic selection process. USAC lost one to the tune of about 600 grand, and settled the other for an unspecified but large amount. Where are they going to get that money? They aren’t exactly rolling in greenbacks right now, and can’t just print more money, so it comes from the surcharge that each racer pays every time they suit up. Fair? Hell I don’t know, but it makes for a good story that I think active racers would like to know about, and its not something that a myopic publication will think to do.
For me the reporting in the newspapers has been dumbed down to the point that it’s useless. Living in a small market I actually know the good reporters that have been replaced by younger, less skilled one’s. The editing stinks to high heaven as they rush to get it out and be anywhere near relevant with on-line and TV. That being said-I REALLY don’t trust radio or TV news sound bites. I actually answered a plea from our local paper to give them suggestions on what they can do to save the ship (SOS) for you young whippersnappers. I suggested they come out only on weekends and offer IN DEPTH reporting of local topics instead of sound bites. Give us a little Consumer Reports kind of analysis of issues and people since they would have more time to fact check and dig. For example-we have a supposedly power generating trash burning operation that will need to be re-built and I’ve heard extreme views by both sides but no neutral, in depth-fact based look at how it works or IF it’s adding too much pollution. I’d be happy to pay for a good examination of the issues. Funny, way back in the day that’s why I loved Time and Newsweek before they turned snarky and ADD. Also suggested they do more interviews with leaders so I can decide for myself what they said or thought instead of the media flavoring or doctoring or spinning it for me.