I recently fielded a nuisance telemarketing call from one of our local newspapers, trying to convince me to buy a subscription. This is a fairly regular occurrence; “no” seems to translate to “try again later” to them, and the calls seem to be getting more frequent… probably because newspapers are in dire financial straits. I told the guy that I didn’t have time to read the newspaper, which is true, but that isn’t the whole story.
The whole story is that newspapers are irrelevant to me. When I lived near Washington DC, there were occasionally-interesting articles on what the federal government was doing (or rather, what they were doing wrong 😉 ), but even then the only section of the paper that I read regularly was the comics. If something happens that will affect or interest me, it’s almost certain that I or my wife will hear about it through our usual Internet news sources, and probably faster than a newspaper could tell us about it anyway.
What’s worse, for the newspaper industry, is that newspapers are increasingly irrelevant to everyone else too. They started out as soapboxes for the rich and politically-minded, picked up advertising to subsidize their costs, and added some actual news (inevitably bad news… “if it bleeds, it leads”) to keep people entertained. Actually keeping people informed has always played third-fiddle to editorials and advertising, and what news does appear almost always has a political slant to it.
(There are exceptions to this, but they’ve always been few and far between, and have gotten even fewer in the last twenty or thirty years.)
Like the music industry, the newspaper industry is a dinosaur. It survived by having exclusive (or exclusively-fast) access to information that people wanted. The Internet has destroyed that exclusivity, and it has been flailing around for the last decade, trying to find a new reason for itself. It’ll be interesting to see whether it succeeds.
As you know, my sister is a journalist, and has suffered a series of layoffs as newspapers cut staff. Invariably, they cut the most important things, like covering Congress which she did for a paper, or local economic hardship as she did for another, in favor of trivia. (Her reporting won awards, but not the kind of readers corporate news publishing conglomerates wanted apparently; which they think are satisfied with minimal wire service coverage of stuff like that.) She has another job now at a small business/investment type newspaper, and it remains to be seen if her career will take a final nose-dive eventually along with the newspaper business. 🙁
That’s a perfect example of how keeping people informed is less important to papers than editorializing and entertaining them. I hope your sister can turn her skills to non-newspaper stuff. Though niche newspapers like that have a better chance of survival than the big ones, since they’re already generally focused on actual news, the stuff that’s important to their readers (otherwise they’d already have gone out of business).
One type of newspaper that is still thriving is the free commuter newspaper. These are ones that are set up in easily accessible stands in and around subway stations and public transit corridors and provide commuters with something to read on their trips to or from work. Because the paper is distributed free, all profits come from advertising, and there are more than enough companies willing to fork out the dough for a crack at this captive audience.
I have no experience with those, so I can’t comment intelligently on them. That’s never stopped me before though. 😉