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Papers Need Innovative Approach
By John W. Kennedy | March 24, 2009
With two big-city newspapers — The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Rocky Mountain News — already biting the dust this month, it looks like a rough season ahead for urban dailies. Papers in San Francisco, Detroit and Philadelphia also are on the brink of extinction. According to a report Monday, 120 newspapers have shut down in the past 14 months, and many more are likely to follow.
Also Monday, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, announced a second round of company-wide weeklong furloughs in an effort to stave off further layoffs.
The dismal economy functions as the nail in the coffin for these newspapers, but the underlying cause is a failure to gauge changing consumer habits. When advertisers and readers began fleeing for the Internet, these media giants had no backup plan for revenue. For some, union workers unwilling to make wage and benefit concessions in order to keep publishing hastened the demise.
Midsize and smaller papers are struggling, but because of lower overhead are able to adjust more quickly. I have to admire recent changes our local newspaper, The Springfield News-Leader, has made in an effort to survive, and I don’t mean just layoffs. On Sundays, the paper shrunk the comics and combined them with the TV listings. On Mondays and Tuesdays, the paper prints two sections instead of the customary four. The opinion pages have been downsized, with practically the entire section given over to local voices rather than paid syndicated columnists.
While it may seem a bit odd to find the lifestyle pages tucked behind the sports, the paper is doing what it takes to remain viable. Some major papers, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, now carry advertisements on the front page.
Americans are experiencing a tremendous upheaval in the way information is delivered. Media outlets that are too slow to make what once seemed like radical adjustments won’t be around much longer.
Topics: newspapers |