Newspapers In Their Last Throes

As soon as advertisers began to realize the power of online media, print journalism began a slow and steady decline. Several years into this grand internet age, retailers are increasingly putting their ads online and paying top bloggers thousands of dollars per ad, hoping to reach the hundreds of thousands that read those publications. Of course, it isn't just the big boys that are getting ad revenue, little blogs like mine are millions strong and while each does not get the readership of a newspaper, collectively the old printed papers are dwarfed by us.

Due to these changes and lost revenues for newspapers, their business model is dying and top icons are in trouble, in fact one large 150 year old Daily is about to go under next month:

EW Scripps Co., the newspaper chain which owns the Rocky Mountain News, announced earlier this month that it was putting it up for sale after losing 11 million dollars in the first nine months of the year.

Employees of the paper went online with iwantmyrocky.com a week ago.

"Unless we can make something happen by the middle of January, our owners could close the Rocky," they wrote on the site.

"The owners of our paper have put us up for sale and hinted at shutting us down if they can't find a buyer," they said. "We are prepared to fight that.

It is admirable to see the staff of the Rocky Mountain News fight off the demands of corporate America, but unless they see a miracle, we won't see them by February. Unless newspapers were allowed to run at a significant loss for the sake of the news and not as a for-profit business, many will succumb in the next few years. Occams Hatchet at DailyKos wrote a brilliant diary last night detailing how he "held a dying newspaper in his hands" yesterday, in reference to the shrinking size of the Los Angeles Times.

Of course, the largest of our nation's papers will find a way to stay online, but by and large many will fail. It might not be for five or ten years, but without an advertising miracle or fantastic funding fix, the end of the medium that is print journalism is coming to an end.