The imminent demise of the New York Times is on the radar screens of many media watchers, but the problem of today's print journalism goes much further than just New York. Due to falling circulations and less interest overall in old fashioned newsprint things are looking terrible for the future of the Fourth Estate across the country.
From Editor and Publisher:
The dawn of the internet age had the heads of the old institutions laughing at the new medium. Now they're struggling to stay afloat as people rely on computers more and more. Some suggest that even our brains are changing as well, but what is certain is that our reading habits are morphing faster and faster. In the business world, that has serious consequences for the newspapers and more importantly, their audiences. Perhaps they'll be forced even more to turn online to not only read what is going on, but be interactive with content providers as well.
CHICAGO Newspaper and newspaper groups are likely to default on their debt and go out of business next year -- leaving "several cities" with no daily newspaper at all, Fitch Ratings says in a report on media released Wednesday.
"Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010," the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.
Fitch is generally pessimistic across the board, assigning negative outlets to nearly all sectors from Yellow Pages to radio and TV and theme parks. But the newspaper industry is the most at risk of defaulting, it says.
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