The newspaper business is getting the shit kicked out of it these days–and there have been fatalities. Yet others are in critical condition.
But the newspaper industry as a whole is not going away.
A decline in circulation and advertising revenues (especially at daily newspapers), combined with the economic mess that’s been hurting almost every business imaginable, has killed off/is killing off economically marginal newspapers. The Rocky Mountain News died last month; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer took its last figurative print-version breaths earlier this week (though Hearst Corp. is keeping it going in a stripped-down, online-only format). We learned just as we were going to press that the Tucson Citizen got a last-minute, temporary reprieve (more details at blog.tucsonweekly.com), but the afternoon daily’s future remains very much up in the air.
As I write this, we here at Weekly World Central are wrapping our heads around a 10 percent budget cut that we need to make.
More newspapers will die in the coming months, given the economy. But the newspaper biz is not dying.
A lot of pundits and talking heads are making predictions about the demise of the newspaper as a whole; I even read one moron who claimed that 85 percent of newspapers will be dead by 2011.
Yes, some newspaper companies–including Gannett and, especially, Lee Enterprises, the Arizona Daily Star‘s owner–overleveraged themselves and are in deep fiscal trouble. However, many newspapers themselves remain profitable despite this economy–and are going to stick around, even if their parent companies falter.
Daily newspapers as a whole have some things to figure out in the long-term–I’ve written before about the self-created downward spiral they put themselves in–but many of them will figure it out. Meanwhile, alternative newsweeklies (like the Tucson Weekly) and well-run niche publications have a steady future ahead of them; we aren’t in a downward spiral at all, although the economy’s put the hurt on us.
The bottom line: For the foreseeable future, we’re here to stay, folks. The rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2009.