Goodbye newspapers
Words Hannah Serrano
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 12:21 am
CNN–“Newspapers fold as readers defect and economy sours”
In our preview issue I wrote an article called “Paper + Pixels,” which led with: “The future of print. (It’s not all gloom-and-doom, we promise.)” But it looks like I may have been dead wrong.
As CNN reports, “More than 120 U.S. newspapers have closed since Jan 2008.”
Following the closure of The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, yesterday The Ann Arbor News announced it will close this summer. In its place: a website called AnnArbor.com.
“More bad news could be coming this week as newspapers struggle to meet challenges posed by changing reader habits, a shifting advertising market, an anemic economy, and the newspaper industry’s own early strategic errors,” reports CNN’s Stephanie Chen.
I cited amongst the numerous things that potentially caused the closure Landmark’s inability to curb its strategy of print investment. As its core product, The Virginian-Pilot, struggles along with every other newspaper in the country, Landmark has been forced to kill a number of print pubs. MIX Magazine and LINK, both newly-launched titles, were closed along with Port Folio. The error then compounded with a crippling economy and a lack of investment in web media is sure to be fatal for the Pilot should it fail to learn from those of its counterparts.
“Amid the decline comes concern over who, if anyone, can assume newspapers’ traditional role as a watchdog. For more than 200 years, that role has been an integral part of American democracy,” Chen writes.
Yet in the end: “The future offers the industry little comfort, with studies showing newspapers have lost a generation of young readers. A Pew Research Center report this month found only one-third of Americans polled say they would “miss” the newspaper a lot if it were no longer around.”
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“…who,if anyone, can assume newspapers’ traditional role as a watchdog.” Come one you have to be kidding me. Newspapers havent been watchdogs for years. They have been liberal lap dogs, doing nothing but pander to the left. I have no pity for them. Had they done their job and report the news and no try to influence votes, they might not be failing at record pace. The country is tired of the liberal bias that these rags shamlessly support and it shows in the constant downward circulation.
I agree with you, Alfredo, that newspapers’ viability has been on the decline, but disagree about the rest of it.
The most depressing trend I’ve seen in wide print media is not a move toward the left, but a suffocation towards the center. A mythical ideal of “objectivity” has left many papers cowardly and without any compelling point of view. The form was much more vital when markets had several daily, weekly and monthly publications with a clear idea of sympathies all over the spectrum. That rarely emerges in print these days.
Alternative weeklies were able to thrive for awhile because they served that vacuum, and the best ones have vigorously transitioned to the web as a platform equal to or greater than the print publications. The internet, as full of nonsense as it is, has at least a world of passionate, disparate views that print can’t fuck with.
As to why these weeklies tend to lean to the crip side, well I don’t know, but a conservative publication with a similar framework would have likely found an audience here, and been a more persuasive force to contend with than whining about media bias. I would have probably hated it, but a lot of people hated Port Folio, too.
Actually, I hated a lot of Port Folio. Not the parts involving anybody who used to work there who reads this comment, of course, but it never really shed the stench of the odious lifestyle rag it was born as. Port Folio got better and more vital when it found impassioned editors and writers who were not afraid to have an opinion. It’s decline came when it tried to reign in that passion and be more moderate. It became totally irrelevant when it alienated or fired all of its best people and tried to become totally accessible and apolitical.
Media bias? I want to see more of it, skewing either way. Papers that strive for illusory objectivity and political/cultural neutrality deserve to die.
You make some good points george but I have to disagree. It is not the job of the media to have an opinion. It is their job to report the news. A paper like Portfolio can have all the opinions it wants, they can spout any view they want to liberal or conservative. I can decide if I want to follow those views, but newspapers are the suppose to be my place to read the facts. it is suppose to be the place where I make my opinions based on what is really happening, not based on their views. As much as I love conservative views, I don’t listen to Rush or Sean Hanaity for unbias news, and i don’t read a newspaper for their opinion on the president.
As I guess I said in my last few stories, the reason I think newspapers are going down the toilet is not to do with any political ideology influencing their content.
The Pilot is conservative by media standards, as much of it is indeed more liberal. But as it serves a conservative-minded community, it may seem to some that The Pilot panders to the left. And if that’s the case, then I’m sure you would’ve used even harsher words than “liberal rag” in referring to Port Folio, Torres, but were just too much of a gentleman.
Fellas, the reason newspapers are falling off is because everyone’s looking at the internet and getting news for free. Paper costs money. I mean, what are we doing, right here, right now.
At the end of the day, Port Folio closed because it is tied to The Pilot, which can no longer afford all its many different assets. So it cut loose hundreds of employees and killed a handful of pubs.
Yes, there’s a whole lot of other stuff involved, but it’s as simple as that at the end of the day.