Next up: Chicago Tribune

I posted on here a while back that I had seen something somewhere that said the last newspaper would be thrown on a doorstep sometime around 2030.

And we’re now in 2021, and whoever wrote about 2030 also didn’t plan for a pandemic, which likely will move up that timeline.

I understand the anger about the suits. Strangely enough, I’m not as angry at the vulture capitalists because at least they’re quite clear about what they’re going to do. Suck up as much money out of the paper, then declare bankruptcy and leave the suckers, er, creditors holding the bag. At least they’re not making empty pronouncements about how important journalism is to them, like some places (Gannett) do.

 

Thank you for saying this. Way too many people on this forum want to complain rather than adapt. The so-called suits aren’t doing us any favors but we all need to join the 21st century if we want to survive.

Insightful piece from Neiman Lab recently on this topic: The real reason local newspapers are dying

 

Cmon, with all due respect, you think sports writers haven't adapted? I won't insult them by listing all they do. Just be assured they have adapted and dominated journalism the past 20 years. I guarantee you all the famous superstar journalists that have been taking buyouts have done all they can. They've adapted and adapted well. I won't list how they've adapted. These superstars adapted, they are just finally giving up after years of getting overworked and underpaid and bossed by the suits.

 

They also are 1/10 the physical size of what they once were and yet cost 10 times as much. They also are full of old news because of ridiculous deadlines. They are overpriced. They are unreliable and undeliverable. Customers see the physical product on their porches infrequently. Also the reliable reporters who had household names in all the big cities have been forced out. Newspapers are not an outdated business model. They have been ruined by the suits and hedge fund owners.

 

If you're talking about the "physical product," you're showing just how behind the times you are. The revenue stream from print is going to keep declining no matter how strong the print product is. Craigslist gutted classified advertising, which at one time brought in 50-60 percent of revenue for most papers. And most businesses don't want to pay for print ads anymore because the "physical" newspaper readership is skewed very old (one-third of print readers are greater than 70 years old). That's why subscription costs have to increase, to make it still profitable to pay for the newsprint and printing presses to actually print the paper. Several papers cut back from seven days a week this year, and many more will follow in the years to come. By 2025, most news organizations probably won't even have a print product anymore. It sucks, but at the end of the day, it's a business, and from the suits on down, the people running the business still haven't evolved enough to make it a profitable one.

The Gannett paper I work for is certainly "digital first," but still beholden to print in a way that damages the web product. One example of many is that we still write game stories about our pro sports teams. Why? For print. Unless something crazy happens, very few people read them online. It's 2021, people know what happened already. But god forbid we don't have game coverage in the paper for all the 70+ year olds who can't use the internet.

The saddest part is most of the other Gannett papers in our area of the country are even more beholden to print than we are, even with their early deadlines. Until the print product is gone, the web product will never be the best it can be.

The Athletic has a business model that might actually work in this new world. Charge for subscriptions, offer readers a great user experience (no ads all over the place), and there's no newsprint or printing presses to pay for. It took a big investment up front, but seems to be paying off. Until newspapers - from the suits on down - can adapt and come up with a new business model and new coverage strategies, the industry is going to keep struggling.

 

Way too many people on this forum don't actually work in the industry.

 

What would you do to make people want print newspapers again?

 

I wouldn’t. It’s not 1991 anymore. We have smartphones and iPads now.

 

I'm not so much worried about the physical paper, as much as I am about the demise of the idea of a newspaper. As people have quit reading newspapers, they've quit going to the websites of their local papers. They don't want to pay for the websites of their local papers, I see that in my town all the time. So what we have is a population that becomes less and less educated about what's going on in their own community which then becomes the state which then becomes the nation. It's not the loss of the physical newspaper, it's the loss of the work that journalists do which is imperative for a democracy. I think we've all seen what happens when the masses are asses.

 

6/10 of that "physical size" is advertising pages that have gone bye-bye.

In Fort Lauderdale our SATURDAY paper was as thick as our Sunday paper in the late 80s. An entire 30-page classified section ("Biggest in Florida," it bragged). Pages and pages of real estate advertising as new housing developments kept springing up everywhere. An entire section of car ads.

 

Many of us did, at one point.

 

That is such tired bullshit. In general, sportswriters are bright, college educated people. They aren't working at the point of a gun. If they are working in an industry that is economically unfeasible, that is their problem. There is no right to having a job and if it sucks, that it the life the writers chose. If there were a better way, without the suits and the scary venture capitalists, somebody would have come up with it.