Goodbye, daily newspapers in Detroit

[Maui Nick]

As a survivor of the newspaper industry (1), I've been expecting this at one or another major newspaper sooner or later. Still hurts to see it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/1..._n_150721.html

And here's what is supposedly the actual circulation notice at the Freep.

https://ecm-c-mass2one.leepfrog.com/...d.cfm?ccode=pm

(1) I'm yet another member of the American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites. If only the beancounters had recognized inevitability when they saw it, maybe tens of thousands of actual reporters would still have jobs.

[classicman]

Daily Newspapers have been getting pummeled for years. The bulk of their income is from the classifieds section. That primarily was made up of Auto, real estate and help wanted ads. These have been getting bleed dry form the internet and the latest economic crisis has only exacerbated the situation. There are over 30 daily papers for sale right now and no one is looking to buy them. The Rocky mountain news is another example.

The readership has been the other half of the problem for papers. Their circulation figures have been declining for a long time and their reader demographics show that their only reaching on average a much older segment of the population. These readers are literally dying off, and so are the papers. They missed the chance to get online first and now they are simply dinosaurs waiting for extinction.

[Maui Nick]

Update: Am told that the Detroit papers will continue to print every day, but people will only be able to subscribe to the Thursday (grocery ads) and Sunday (loaded with ads) editions.

Saves 'em a boatload in terms of not hiring a bunch of people to deliver the paper 7 days, but what happens if they don't get the bump in newsstand sales they're expecting?

[spudcon]

Newspapers, TV news, and news magazines are all suffering from declining users, and the reason is simple. They now have competition from the internet, and surfers can now get different perspectives on the news, instead of the cookie cutter clones the media have been offering for decades. They are dinosaurs, and they can't figure out why.

[xoxoxoBruce]

This is an opportunity for some unemployed (there are a few in Detroit, right?) to do a little entrepreneurial paper distribution.

[Undertoad]

I remember reading the Philadelphia Inquirer daily. When the web came around, and suddenly articles from around the world were available, it made it clear how shitty a paper it actually was for a big city. How little content they actually had to produce in order to do a daily paper. How crappy the editorials were for a big deal editorial board.

I'll never get over the day I read the Inqy story about how the Jersey shore faces a deluge of car accidents during the summer because 24% of their accidents happen in June, July, and August. I remember thinking that if they had a Reply button there would be more useful information in the comments than in the stories.

[Maui Nick]

Originally Posted by spudcon

Newspapers, TV news, and news magazines are all suffering from declining users, and the reason is simple. They now have competition from the internet, and surfers can now get different perspectives on the news, instead of the cookie cutter clones the media have been offering for decades. They are dinosaurs, and they can't figure out why.

Not exactly. Most of the newspapers and web sites get their news from the same places -- take a look at how many web sites take feeds from the Associated Press. Same content, different addresses. Way back when, that model worked. People in Detroit didn't often get to read the Miami Herald, for instance, so it didn't make a difference.

If you want to know what really went wrong, it went like this: The business types looked at us reporters, declared that we silly bachelor-of-arts types don't understand how business really works and condescendingly informed us that the Internet would never supplant the daily dead-tree product because ... well, the daily newspaper is a tradition and nothing could ever break that tradition.

Actually, those folks couldn't figure out how to make money on it. In a good business environment, most businesses turn a profit of six or seven percent. Traditionally, newspapers' profit margins have run 20 percent or more --- an enormous return on investment, almost a license to print money. Circulation revenues are just a drop in the bucket compared to what the advertisements bring in.

We-the-journalists were ready a decade and more ago to explore paid online methods of distribution. Unfortunately, the bean counters weren't ready to accept a lower profit margin than what they had grown used to, so they declared online product secondary to what they consider the real product --- the daily printed newspaper. The idea that people would get used to the online product, and that younger people who never knew any other way would abandon the print product ... the bean counters never really considered that possibility until about four or five years ago, which was at least four or five years too late.

Thus endeth my rant.

(And if I sound bitter about that ... well, that's because I was one of the journalists rather than one of the bean counters.)

[Maui Nick]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I remember reading the Philadelphia Inquirer daily. When the web came around, and suddenly articles from around the world were available, it made it clear how shitty a paper it actually was for a big city. How little content they actually had to produce in order to do a daily paper. How crappy the editorials were for a big deal editorial board.

I'll never get over the day I read the Inqy story about how the Jersey shore faces a deluge of car accidents during the summer because 24% of their accidents happen in June, July, and August. I remember thinking that if they had a Reply button there would be more useful information in the comments than in the stories.

Based on what I've seen, most "comments" sections are useless. Lots of ill-informed prattle, no real information.

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by Maui Nick

Based on what I've seen, most "comments" sections are useless. Lots of ill-informed prattle, no real information.

As opposed to newspapers and TV very informed prattle, no real information.

[classicman]

update....

Chicago's newspapers facing troubled futures

CHICAGO (AP) - A little more than a century ago, Chicago boasted 11 daily English-language newspapers.

The fierce competition among them, immortalized in the 1928 play "The Front Page," even turned bloody at times, and that drive to outdo one another led to 35 Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's highest honor.

Today, only two major dailies remain in this city of 3 million, and both are in serious trouble from declining circulation, plummeting ad revenue and a new kind of competition that threatens to make newsprint itself obsolete.

Suddenly, "Stop the presses!" carries new meaning.

Even as the arrest of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on federal corruption charges brought the latest and most luscious of scandals to the teeth of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, questions were swirling about their futures.

How long can the smaller Sun-Times survive as its parent, Sun-Times Media Group Inc., loses money every quarter? And what of the dominant Tribune, whose parent Tribune Co. sought bankruptcy protection this month because of its crushing $13 billion debt?

Both papers are steeped in history, the Chicago Tribune's most famous single edition trumpeting erroneously in 1948, "Dewey Defeats Truman." The Tribune first published in 1847, while the Sun-Times, formed in a 1948 merger, has its roots in the Chicago Evening Journal in 1844, making it the city's oldest continuously published daily.

"I think it's great that Chicago still has two newspapers, and it would be a great disappointment to lose either of them," said Tom Spees, 50, a health-information service director who was looking through a Sun-Times left by another customer at Merle's coffee shop near a North Side "el" train station.

But at a downtown Starbucks sat the possible future of news - and the source of much of the newspaper industry's troubles.

Michelle Kurlemann plugged her laptop computer into a wall outlet and thumbed away at her BlackBerry. The 24-year-old interior designer said the closing of either paper would be "really sad," but she wasn't reading one of them, not in print anyway.

"I get my news online, and when someone I know sees a good newspaper article, they message it to me," Kurlemann said. "Still, I suppose that if the newspapers close, it'll hurt things online, too."

To newsprint addicts, those are sad words.

Even in the early 1970s, Chicago still had four major dailies - the others had either folded or been merged.

Their reporters had their own culture, including a rather flexible code of ethics.

I have nothing to add. As a former employee at a daily, this day has been coming for a long time.

[monster]

Seems like 85% of bean counters are at fault....

[classicman]

Well that or its 85% tw's fault

[xoxoxoBruce]

But tw didn't work for the papers, you did... it's your fault.

[classicman]

See, I told my boss he couldn't do it without me - its true!

[Maui Nick]

Originally Posted by monster

Seems like 85% of bean counters are at fault....

Greedy little turds that they are …