The Decline of Newspapers

My old friend Jean lost her job last week.  Her company is part of an industry which gave away the very product it was trying to sell and now faces its own, self-created doom.  I wonder how her industry will look by the time we get to the other end of this process.

You may remember my friend Jean Torkelson.  She was a reporter for the Times Leader in the 80’s and she was terrific.  Not only was she a wonderful writer with a subtle touch, she was also the only reporter who ever quoted me precisely in an interview.  Some would get it plain wrong.  Others would paraphrase more or less accurately.  Jean nailed the quotes.  Your words and your meaning, all set in the context you meant.  Jean T never burned a single interview subject; she simply let you do it to yourself.

I fully expected Jean to realize her manifest destiny and head east to the Washington Post or the New York Times.  I mean, where else?  Jean knew, and headed in the opposite direction.  She went west to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, a great newspaper which was probably a better fit for Jean’s conservative inner soul.  She was there for years, writing about a variety of subjects including another of her favorites, religion.

All of that ended last week.  The Rocky Mountain News was older than the state of Colorado itself and just weeks short of its 150^th birthday when it went out of business.  It is the first wave hitting the shore in what I believe will be a massive change in the way we get our news. 

The Rocky Mountain News is only the first of many troubled newspapers around the country.  If the San Francisco Examiner closes—as it is forecast to do—San Fran will be without a daily newspaper for the first time since the 1850’s.  The Washington Post is in trouble, as are the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.  The New York Times has shrunk its page size, cut staff and mortgaged their building, all in an attempt to stay ahead of the reaper. 

Sadly, I can’t get past the thought that the papers did it to themselves.  For the radio show, I access the news wires every single day looking for stories from legitimate news outlets.  I use the stories and their facts as the backdrop for our talk topics.  Each day from 5-8PM I comb through hundreds of stories easily located online from the Times, the Examiner, the Post, the Inquirer and yes, even the Rocky Mountain News.  I’m getting their news for free every day.  Why would I pay?  I wouldn’t, of course, and that seems to be the problem.

It started innocently enough.  Not that many people used the internet for news 10 years ago, so the papers could increase their profile and provide a service.  It didn’t take long for the papers to see that more people were reading them for free and the losses were mounting.  They tried to change the formula.  The Times tried charging for its online news for a time, got a bad response and ended the experiment. 

Now the same thing is happening in TV and radio.  YouTube has allowed viewers to access news stories quite independently of the networks which reported them in the first place.  These days you can watch the story, share the story and comment on it whenever you like. 

I don’t know what’s going to happen next.  Our talk show is built around the news.  Blogs and all social commentary are built around the news.  But if there are no papers to pay for the services, then what will happen to the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN and the like?  After all, if no one is paying for the product, no one will be gathering the news. 

We’ll have to get used to the idea of paying for this news or doing without it.  The news world is changing and we’ll have to change with it.  Ask Jean Torkelson; she knows all about it.