Times-Union Makes A Bigger Audience For Itself

If there is any one word to describe the newspaper industry, it is "decline." Many institutions have closed and advertising revenues are falling across the board. The fact is, people are getting more of their news online and from sources that aren't always first found in print. There has certainly been a lot of complaining from newspaper executives that whine about the big bad internet, the same medium they had belittled not ten years ago. Of course that doesn't apply to every publication, like New York's very own Times-Union, which despite losing a chunk of their print audience, still managed to add readers at a clip that puts them in the top ten of the nation.

From The Times-Union:

The newspaper's net combined audience of print and online readership increased 8.7 percent to 506,929 for the six months prior to March 31, the seventh-best growth of any U.S. daily, according to Editor & Publisher, an industry trade journal. The measurement includes those who have read a newspaper's print edition in the past seven days and its Web site within the past 30 days.

The Times Union also recorded a slight increase in Sunday circulation, rising to 141,105 for the October-to-March period from 141,064 in the same six months a year earlier.

But the newspaper's average Monday-through-Friday circulation decreased to 78,973 in the most recent reporting period from 89,257 a year earlier. That's an 11 percent decline.

The reality about print newspapers is that they are on their way out. What the newspaper industry does about it is up to them. For the Times Union at least, they are doing something right to gain overall readers and for that, they are commended.

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.

Cities Without Newspapers Will Be A Reality Sooner Than You Think

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:

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.

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.

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