One-third of U.S. newspapers as of 2005 will be gone by 2024: Medill report

One-third of U.S. newspapers as of 2005 will be gone by 2024: Medill report (axios.com)

 

Axios, with its bullet-point approach to journalism -- is it part of the solution, or part of the problem?

 

nice headline on that story

 

I thought it’d be much more.

 

How many newspapers in your area have gone out of business since 2005? In the highly populated county I lived in until 2020, all I can remember is a group of six weekly newspapers serving relatively poor communities.

 

• No
• And yes

 

A bunch. I'd say 10 within a 25-mile radius of my house. Most of those were owned by Gannett.

 

Around here, Gannett buys up all the small local dailies, begins pivoting toward online-only, and cuts the staff to the bare bones.

Including next to no local sports coverage. My first daily had five full-timers in 1976. Today, they have one guy doing 1-2 stories a week.

All the web sites look identical. And they just love articles that can run in multiple outlets, to the extent that they force that upon areas that don't really care about said article.

 

There are 3 "daily" Gannett papers in my county. Only 1 has a Sunday edition. The one on the east side of the county traditionally covered high schools the next county over because it was often the only coverage they would get.
And they had a pretty high readership from those areas too.
Now, the big city paper, which has the only sports staff, does 'area games to watch" or "area players to watch" and completely ignores the schools and athletes in the adjoining county, to the point the Eastside paper's print product is basically a condensed version of the big city version.

 

Considering the state of most newspapers, being gone forever would be an improvement.

 

Out of the five newspapers I worked for, one has cut back to once a week circulation instead of 3x week, one declared bankruptcy after 87 years of family ownership and was sold off and two no longer exist as print products. And then there’s the Valdosta Daily Times, inexplicably hanging in there like a cockroach in a nuclear holocaust.

 

I think you have to define what counts as a newspaper. For example, does a newspaper with zero local staff produced at a distant plant but using a 100 year old local masthead still count as an independent paper?