Revenues shrinking to MicroMachine proportions, newsroom jobs disappearing like sand under a rising tide, “They’ll Do It Every Time” discontinued: Is this, as the New York Observer asks, the worst year ever for the modern newspaper business? Here are five other contenders:
1931: The New York World, acclaimed as “the best-informed, best-informing paper in the country,” closes after Joseph Pulitzer’s sons defy their father’s will and sell the paper to Scripps-Howard for $5 million. The World’s dissolution presaged the coming era of newspaper consolidation. Although nominally amalgamated into a new entity called the New York World-Telegram, the independent editorial spirit that defined the old World did not carry. Columnist Frank Sullivan: “When I die I want to go wherever the World has gone, and work on it again.”
1957: Paul Miller succeeds Frank Gannett as president of the Gannett chain of newspapers. By the time he retired in 1978, Miller had transformed Gannett from a relatively small family-owned business into a nationwide chain of nearly eighty newspapers. Miller was the standard-bearer of what A.J. Liebling would call “the march to private monopoly and its inevitable, because profitable, consequences—newspapers newsless or filled with synthetic “news.” This is an economic process like the displacement of oranges from “orange drink.”
1963: Seven million Americans find out what it would be like to get along without newspapers—and, from most reports, they get along fine. The production staffers for New York’s daily newspapers waged a 114-day strike, which shut down all of the city’s dailies, cost nearly $200 million and put the New York Mirror out of business. “There was inconvenience for the readers and the merchants lost money—but there was nothing like fear; and that was because citizens, by radio if by no other means, could still discern the broad outline of what was going on,” wrote Carl Lindstrom in 1964’s The Fading American Newspaper.
1982: USA Today launches under the following motto: “An economy of words, a wealth of information.” A decent newspaper that is unfairly maligned, USA Today—the brainchild of Paul Miller’s successor, Al Neuharth—nonetheless came to emblematize a news ethic that emphasized gloss and presentation over depth and thought that all regions of the country were, essentially, interested in the same things. There’s nothing wrong with presenting a wealth of information—but as soon as the public becomes able to access that information itself, via the Internet and other means, all that’s left for newspapers is an economy of words.
1999: Craigslist.org, the free online classified-ad service founded as a free email list by entrepreneur Craig Newmark, incorporates. At the vanguard of the Internet ad revolution, Craiglist was and is a prime example of how online outlets can offer advertisers a better, cheaper way to reach their clientele. Who buys classified ads in newspapers any more?
Any anni horribiles that I’m missing?
This doesn't really make any sense. Were any of those particularly bad years for the newspaper industry as a whole? This is just a series of anecdotes, some of them about bad things happening to particular papers or geographic regions, but they aren't tied to any general decline in the industry. With USA Today, you just mention that it launched in 1982, and you counter your own argument by saying it's unfairly maligned. But even if it were fairly maligned, it has nothing to do with whether newspapers in general had a good year or a bad year in 1982. And the incorporation of Craigslist had nothing to do with whether 1999 was a good or bad year. Each one of these entries suffers from a similar absence of logic.
Posted by dan on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 06:22 PM
A series of anecdotes? No shit. This is obviously not a quantitative analysis of economic slumps in the newspaper industry, nor is it some sort of balance sheet. It's just an acknowledgement that there have been other times when, for various reasons, people have had reason to be pessimistic about the future of newspapers, be it economic pessimism or conceptual pessimism. That's not to try to minimize the industry's current problems; not to say that "it's been bad before, and we pulled through." But, if you look back, people have always thought that newspapers are dying. And I think that's kind of interesting.
Posted by Justin Peters on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 06:45 PM
The history of American newspapers is constant reinvention, merger, and destruction, leading to another cycle. That's why many Metro daily newspaper titles have hypenated names. It reminds people that someone died. Of all of the newspapers you mention above, only USA Today survives today. So if this generation of newspapers dies off, who is to say another won't appear in some new form.
Posted by ed on Thu 24 Jul 2008 at 09:55 PM
Justin: Great list to start a conversation. The NY newspaper strike not only killed the Mirror, but also led to slow death of a number of papers, most notably the Herald-Tribune.
I would also include 1985, the year that newspaper circulation began its long slide. In 1984, U.S. newspaper circulation peaked at 63.3 million, though even by then market penetration had begun to slide.
Posted by Gary on Fri 25 Jul 2008 at 01:07 AM
Journalists so often see newspaper threats coming mostly from corporate consolidation or from the pressure of alternative news channels. It is surprising that a craft so well schooled to look under the covers and behind the scenes often misses key points in the story. Look instead at 1978 when the Postal Service decided to give discounts for direct mail, stating its target competitor was newspaper advertising. Look at the ad market shares that followed for the next 20 years. It led to the plethora of preprints in the weekly and Sunday paper, and cut away the news hole. Look at the Big Box stores, like Circuit City and, yes, Wal Mart, that displaced the department stores--old reliable ROP advertisers, who helped to pay for the pages in the pressrun. Look at the consolidation of media buys into ad agencies staffed by 20 somethings who do not read newspapers and who are just biding time until they can get into sexier media jobs. Look at the advent of Do Not Call rules, which most editorial pages hailed, and which cut off the circulation department's most reliable way to replace fallen readers with new ones. It's all about the revenue--as it shrinks, the pressure to cut costs and consolidate grows. After that, look at credit markets, debt, the pressure from old newspaper family heirs wanting their dividends, and, finally, our neighbors who really think all of that news on the Internet got there for free. As an industry, we don't even understand our own story. How can we expect the public to get it?
Posted by Tonda Rush on Fri 25 Jul 2008 at 10:41 AM
Look, you stated explicitly that these years were "contenders" for "worst year ever" for newspapers. You asked specifically for "anni horribiles," not for more isolated incidents or irrelevant events that occurred within or without the industry.
It's not that you used anecdotes; it's that you used anecdotes that have *nothing to do* with whether those years were bad, much less the worst ever, or even whether people were pessimistic. It's addled. It's nonsensical. It doesn't have to be a "quantitative analysis," but it does have to make some kind of sense.
Just for one example, who in 1999 was sitting around in a newsroom saying "I am pessimistic. Did you hear? Craigslist has incorporated. *Incorporated*, I tells you! We're doomed."
And what's with the "no shit?" Is this the Columbia Journalism Review, or is it your personal, somewhat obnoxious blog? Are you a professional, or are you just another dime-a-dozen blogger?
Posted by Dan on Fri 25 Jul 2008 at 11:51 AM
Hey, Justin. Again, thanks for a fun list. It's just a starting point. And Tonda, some great points - often regulatory or business changes make for tipping points. You could say the consolidation of department stories was big. Or the decision not to jump in and go all-color (how can anything be black & white in this world - especially a Food section). Or whenever it was that the tax code was written so that investment houses get a better tax break than corporations. Or when they wrote the laws that allow Sam Zell or the Chandlers to avoid paying taxes. It is unfortunate that people, myself included - OK, maybe even Justin with the 'Oh...' comment, get so wound up. It's an interesting intellectual exercise. This discussion is exactly what I am looking for after wading through most comment boards that seem to be filled with so my anonymous anger. I do not know Justin. But I hope to read more of his "off the top of my head" lists. Maybe the 10 best years in journalism. "Thanks, Mr. Gutenberg!"
By the way, CJR has the best Verification words - "Morrisey alliance."
Posted by Gary on Fri 25 Jul 2008 at 10:04 PM
Tonda - You hit a lot of the elements. Don't overlook perhaps the biggest "hidden" factor one of all: The power elite that's been buying and dismantling newspapers for the past 15 years is, coincidentally, made up of the very people who'd LOVE to see the irritating investigative press go away. Who more than Bob Jelenic, Bruce Sherman and Dean Singleton would benefit from the demise of hard-hitting Wall Street investigative reporting? (Perhaps the very kind of reporting that could have shown how the neo-cons "Free Market" deregulation march has led the American economy to the brink of 1929 again)?
What ... ah, serendipity ... that the uber-wealthy, politically conservative types like Sam Zell got control of the very media outlets that exposed generations of Enrons, Tycos, Countrywides, Franklin Nationals and more.
Is it any surprise Rupert Murdoch and Singleton have acquired seats on the Associated Press board? That the multibillion-dollar Tribune sale came after intensive lobbying to get around long-established federal regulations designed precisely to stop the runaway consolidation of all major media? And that this happened during the adminstration of Cheney/Rove, which despises a free press more than Spiro Agnew could have imagined doing?
Posted by Don on Sat 26 Jul 2008 at 12:14 AM
Don't only look at this issue from the United States perspective. Globally the business of newspapers is having to adapt to advertisers reducing spending on print. Spending on on-line marketing is increasing but not compensating for the loss. Less income means less money for journalism under current business models. It's sad but part of complex trends in communication. Newspapers aren't dead yet but need to re-invent how they can make money out of communication that is credible and trusted by the readership.
Posted by bish (australia) on Sat 2 Aug 2008 at 12:33 AM