Running through a week’s worth of post saved in my Bloglines reader, I’m almost stunned by the amount of bad news. A few of the headlines:
Orange County Register to lay off about 5% of its workforce
Reluctantly, a Daily Stops Its Presses, Living Online (and more than 20 newsroom staff lost there jobs)
Print newspaper circ continues on its steep downward slide
How Low Can You Go? (Mark Potts’s wrap of the latest gruesome financials from big media companies.) See also: The capital crisis in the newspaper industry deepens.
There are more, but you get the idea. And none of this is new, it’s all a continuation of trends — to smaller staffs putting out newspapers with less circulation that are run by companies whose value is heading south.
These are all American stories, and we know the American economy is not in great shape. But media watchers also know that while a souring economy may be driving some of this, it only marks the acceleration of trends that were well established. We’ve been watching large-scale layoffs (and newspaper closings) for at least the past three years. Circulation losses, ad revenue losses, share value losses — none of these are new or unique to these economic times.
Just before taking off last week, I was at a newspaper industry function where I was talking to the publisher of a chain-owned, community-based suburban newspaper. The chain has a nice formula for success: free distribution throughout the market, fairly high quality journalism done by smallish staffs, aggressive ad sales in competitive markets and so on. “How’s business?” I asked. “It’s good. It’s not as good as it should be, but it’s good,” he told me. So even some of those that have figured the print thing out, and are operating on the more stable Canadian newspaper scene, recognize something is happening.
Yeah, newspapers still make boatloads of cash and the returns are still in the double-digit range for many. But it must be becoming clearer and clearer to everybody that the newspaper industry — not journalism, but the industry — as we know it is in jeopardy.
There was something else I noticed in all those posts: a number that rang with journalists’ anger, which is surely connected to that sense of jeopardy. An example: Steve Outing felt some of the wrath in responses to his post on why he had stopped subscribing to the local daily. He enumerates (and answers) some of them in Responses to a pile of critics. It’s instructive reading.
Tags: business, newspapers
