For anyone who still loves newspapers (and apparently that’s a smaller number of people everyday), it’s hard to hear that New Orleans Times-Picayune, along with three other papers owned by Newhouse/Advance in Alabama, will be going to a three day a week print schedule (Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays), firing a bunch of employees, and moving to a digital-centric focus. What’s strangest, and possibly most ominous, is that the trend is for media companies to spin off their newspapers into new companies separate from their digital product (this is the case with the Times-Picayune, along with papers owned by the Tribune Company), which seems like a preparatory move to just dump the papers entirely. Not that the state of daily newspaper reporting is great anyway, but it seems like everything is going to get cheaper, faster, and less useful.


This article appears in May 24-30, 2012.

The editor of the Tucson Weekly. I have no idea how I got here.

6 replies on “Yep, Newspapers Are Screwed”

  2. If the Arizona Daily Czar is any example of why “news”papers are dying away, then other liberal group-hugs like the WEAKLY Reader can’t be collapsing far behind.

  3. Dan, newspapers circulations have been seeing a down-ward trend for
    many years…Going on line (for a small fee) may be a viable route to
    survive.

  4. Think of the saying; I cut the board 3 times & it’s still too short! The guy just did’nt get it…next, think of The Tucson Citizen and it’s far left staff. The further left they went they more the circulation dropped losing moderate & conservative readers. Then they folded & wondered why they too came up short…

  5. The Arizona Daily Star has Fitz who will rewrite history to slam someone else. IE; his cartoon about about prohibition slamming the far right blaming them for it. Whereas in real life; Democrat President Woodrow Wilson signed it & the vote for it was 140 to 64 in the Democratic Party and 138 to 62 among Republicans. Then you get the Fitz readers who don’t know he is lying VS the other readers who went to school who know he is lying. The point being, they too are turning off readers. Another Tucson Citizen? Many of us prefer to look at both sides and not blindly be a stooge for a political party where it is a anything for the party – hail to the party. Nope, not getting sucked into that like a Fitz.

  6. When the newspapers insult the readers – of course the readers are going to abandon them. When the newspapers are jacking up advertising rates of course they lose advertisers. So what do they do? Jack up the rates again and guess what happens, they lose even more advertisers.

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