Decline In US Newspaper Readership Accelerates 420
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that US newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. Online, newspapers are still a success — but only in readership, not in profit. Ads on newspaper Internet sites sell for pennies on the dollar compared with ads in their ink-on-paper cousins. 'Newspapers have ceased to be a mass medium by any stretch of the imagination,' says Alan D. Mutter, a former journalist and cable television executive who now consults and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter only 13 percent of Americans, or about 39 million, now buy a daily newspaper, down from 31 percent in 1940. 'Publishers who think their businesses are going to live or die according to the number of bellybuttons they can deliver probably will see their businesses die,' writes Mutter. 'The smart ones will get busy on Plan B, assuming there is a Plan B and it's not already too late.' Almost without exception, the papers that lost the least readers or even gained readership are the nation's smallest daily newspapers which tend to focus almost all of their limited resources on highly local news that is not covered by larger outside organizations and have a lock on local ad markets."
Re:Bellybuttons? Wha? (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, it's talking about the Jellyfish's debut album.
No, it's talking about how many "eyes" or "people" are getting the paper. It's a cute way of indicating individual people, that's all!
Re:Where are the ads? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Other notable exception: WSJ (Score:1, Informative)
"The WSJ began including paid online subscribers in their circulation in 2003."
Making their numbers from that chart practically useless.
Re:Where are the ads? (Score:3, Informative)
However, the trick to counter this little menace is to block the anti_adblock js-file. Works like a charm.
I seriously doubt that there is an easy and hard-to-defeat method that will stop adblocking software(I haven't seen any).
Re:Evolve or die..... (Score:2, Informative)
I've never read a newspaper a day in my life, other than some stupid school assignments to cut-out articles and write reports about them. I simply didn't see the need when local news provided all the information that mattered, and with the purchase of my first 1 kbit/s modem in 1988 it became even less important. I could read the news online.
That was the 80s/90s.
Now today local news has expanded from 1 hour a day to 5 hours a day, plus cable news, plus web. I didn't need the paper then and I certainly don't need it now.
Re:Possible causes (Score:5, Informative)
Ya know "objective reporting" is a myth. Prior to 1950 the Philadelphia Inquirer proudly trumpeted that it was pro-Republican. Many papers had the words directly in their names - "The Peoria Democrat".
And I see nothing wrong with that. Newspapers were invented as a way for the owner to express his views. If you didn't like those views, create a competing newspaper. That's what liberty and "free press" means... to say whatever you want to say, even if it's biased towards your own view.
Spot on. Newspapers in the UK and Ireland are still pretty open about what parties they support, they really nail their colours to the mast. If you want to win a British general election, you're on an uphill task if you don't have the tabloid press on your side.
Broadcast media is a bit different though. In the UK and Ireland people expect a certain amount of objectivity in the broadcast media. In the UK political parties cannot buy advertising time on TV, instead they each get the same amount of time allocated for "party political broadcasts" that are usually about ten minutes long before the main nightly news, and that's about it. The power of television is such that in the UK they prefer to make sure it's not open to political influence, which is why British people are a bit shocked when they turn on Fox News or MSNBC and see the blatant editorialising on the air.
Re:Why are ads so much cheaper online though? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:first (Score:3, Informative)
If you are signed in and hit "post anonymously", it will wipe out the mods.
The only way to comment and moderate is to comment while completely logged out.
Re:Where are the ads? (Score:3, Informative)
With the advent of the 24 hours news channel and the internet, they quickly became obsolete asthey rehashed 2-3 day old news.
Re:Any alternatives? (Score:2, Informative)
James O'Keefe . Zombie (www.zombietime.com) are the first two that just jump to mind. Then there's the ACORN scandals, the Kevin Jennings scandal, Van Jones, Valerie Jarrett the slum lord, Michelle Obama and her hospital's practice of shoving poor patients to other hospitals.
Like we need more fake Rush Limbaugh quotes, fact-checking of SNL skits, or another Rathergate.
-john
Re:Possible causes (Score:4, Informative)
Broadcast media is a bit different though. In the UK and Ireland people expect a certain amount of objectivity in the broadcast media. In the UK political parties cannot buy advertising time on TV, instead they each get the same amount of time allocated for "party political broadcasts" that are usually about ten minutes long before the main nightly news, and that's about it. The power of television is such that in the UK they prefer to make sure it's not open to political influence, which is why British people are a bit shocked when they turn on Fox News or MSNBC and see the blatant editorialising on the air.
In Britain you have the BBC. There are other news networks, but the BBC is government funded through licensing (yes, apparently you need a license to have a TV in Britain) and is generally the most popular. As best I can tell the BBC is so politically correct they don't dare run anything that could offend anyone.
Rather than just not being controversial, I would rather just have choices. In America, if I don't like a reporter I change the channel. If I like Fox, I watch Fox, if I like CNN I watch CNN. Bias is only a problem if opposing views are not available. In America we have Fox (right wing), CNN (left wing), and NBC (very left wing). We have national news broadcast , local news subsidiaries, papers, talk radio, and now blogs. If I don't like what someone says on a station, I don't watch them. If I want a different point of view, I watch something biased from the other side. The issue of bias is something that goes way back. America's founders even worried about biased information in papers. They decided it impossible to eliminate all bias when discussing something controversial, so they decided it was best to do the opposite and allow for newspapers to say whatever they want creating so many viewpoints. This was the idea behind the first amendment, allow for a wide variety of opinions.
If you don't like something or don't agree with something, don't watch. I think most people understand that the media is biased.
Re:Are you surprised? (Score:3, Informative)
We don't hear them whining about economic collapse, do we? In fact this past year was one of their best years with a huge bumper crop and plenty of excess food to feed their families.
The Amish are commercial farmers.
They are as focused on markets and costs as any other - and have been for generations.
The Amish are not excmpt from property taxes, suburban development and rising land prices.
Family members often do have to take on jobs in town to make ends meet.
Re:No integrity (Score:5, Informative)
" ... We did indeed, quietly. ship a shipload of uranium out of Iraq. ..."
Uranium, by itself, is more more a WMD than a lump of aluminum is a fighter jet.
Your source reveals a supply of yellowcake was found in Iraq. It's one of the most common elements on Earth, and there are traces of it in the dirt around your yard.
You can't make a bomb out of yellowcake, in fact you can't even use it as reactor fuel, without a whole lot of elaborate, expensive, and time-consuming processing. After you do that, then you can start to think about more elaborate work to turn it into an WMD.
Re:Where are the ads? (Score:4, Informative)
I somehow magically get no ads without being a subscriber.. not sure how it happened, but one day slashdot told me.. 'you are awesome, want us to disable ads for you?'
As I type this post, on the main page I still have a small box that says "Ads disabled (tick) - thanks for helping make slashdot great"
haven't heard anyone else talk about this feature.. so I don't know how common it is, or if it's one of those unspoken things, but yeah
Re:You deserved George Bush (Score:1, Informative)
If you can't read and understand a 5,000 word news story http://www.pulitzer.org/works/2008-Investigative-Reporting-Group1 [pulitzer.org] [pulitzer.org] that shows you how the free market system is failing...
There is little-to-no "free market system" in the US these decades. Finance and auto certainly do not qualify. Healthcare? Probably the least free of them all (professional licensing, device regulation, endless hurdles to deploy or import, perverse incentives to divorce decision makers from payers, etc). If you have missed this, it may not matter how many words you read.
Re:Evolve or die..... (Score:3, Informative)
> What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called
> "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program,
What about them? You are laboring under the mistaken notion any of those required a lot of work. All of those were the result of one whistleblower/traitor (depending on your viewpoint, but that question is offtopic for this discussion) doing a document dump on a friendly reporter. In a world without a legacy media they would have dumped on one of the new media outlets. In those cases you mention wikileaks, dailykos, huffingtonpost, etc. would have been able to ignite enough publicity to get the job done.
> > Thought experiment.
> [citation needed]?
No. First this isn't wikipedia. Second the point was for YOU to start noticing how bad the media is by paying attention to how often they get facts in reporting where you know enough about the subject to spot the problems. Any example cited would devolve into a discussion about that particular example and miss the point.
> But this reasoning essentially boils down to the statement that newspapers don't have a perfect
> record of accuracy and, therefore, they must be totally inaccurate. Clearly that's fallacious reasoning.
And had I made that argument you would have a point. But I didn't so you don't. The legacy media make the claim they have serious resources to devote to producing a professional product that is accurate and in depth. But by allowing the sort of obvious and trivial errors to make it into print that one can find in almost any published story these days it casts serious doubt that ANYONE other than the original writer ever seriously read the piece prior to publication. If multiple fact checkers, editors, etc. were actually involved in the production process one of them would have noticed and fixed the obvious typos.
In days of yore, before computers, a typo making it into print in a first rate newspaper was a fairly rare event. Grizzled editors wielded their red pen like a crazed English teacher. if you wanted to know how to write perfect English you could read the New York Times, what appeared on those pages WAS the 'official' definition of the current state of the language and it really was "All the news that was fit to print." Not anymore.
And if reporters are, as I suspect in the majority of cases, simply uploading stories straight into a content management system from where they get dumped almost unseen, certainly not carefully read, onto the web and print edition then exactly how is this different from a blogger? Because the reporter is wearing pants instead of pajamas? And who is verifying the reporter is really wearing pants? Bet Jason Blair wasn't. And that clown got away with inventing stories for years at the highest levels of journalism. How many more such scandals are waiting?
> Besides which, I'd imagine that most spell-checking is relegated to a computer program.
And that nobody in the production chain even bothers to hit the spell check/grammar check button speaks volumes. I'm only posting to slashdot but I usually notice the red underline and fix most of the bad typos.
Re:Evolve or die..... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't blame it on the newspapers.
In the old days the newspapers would be delivered on time. Now the EU has ordered the liberalisation of mail service and our national mail service is on the fast track to be privatised. That means they fired thousands of people and are subcontracting thousands of borderline illiterate kids for the minimum wage, the prices went up and the service went down really fast. Now I can't get my newspapers on time and I can't even trust that my correspondence won't get lost or delivered to someone else.
About the newspapers, they won't be missed. They all belong to half a dozen huge media conglomerates. If I open ANY major newspaper in my country, they all say the same: Lots of right-wing, ultra-free-market, pro-EU-bureaucracy garbage and a bunch of news about violent crimes and gossip about imbecile TV celebrities. As an example, all the major newspapers campaigned very hard for the approval of the Treaty of Lisbon, all news about the Treaty presented it in a positive way, all newspaper commenters agreed, but there wasn't a single line explaining to the citizens what the wretched treaty is and the consequences to the European people's lives. The treaty is a disgrace to the common citizen of EU but it's in the interest of the big money corporations and their organs of propaganda treated it accordingly, of course.
Also the editorial quality has gone down due to cutting costs. I've come to expect news to be poorly written and full of orthography errors. It's only normal that people don't trust the newspapers any more and don't want to spend money on them.
TV is the next to follow. I don't watch any TV at all. The news are usually manipulated or outright lies. All the commenter and pundits that talk on TV say the same right-wing bullshit. Why should I spend my time and my brain cells being duped?
It's funny that people bitch all the time about government interference in the freedom of media but nobody thinks about big-money interference in the same freedom.
Fortunately, there's the Internet.
Re:Evolve or die..... (Score:3, Informative)
What about the investigative journalism that revealed the existence of the so-called "torture memos", or the secret CIA prisons, or the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, or the neglect of injured veterans at the VA?
What about the "investigative" journalism that suddenly brings up quotes from Rush Limbaugh from many years ago that everyone has missed all these years (because he never said them)?
What about the "investigative" journalism that found military papers from the 1970's about George Bush, that were typed up using Word 2003?
How about the way all of these journalists will all suddenly come up with an unusual word to describe someone, like gravatas? It's almost like they all receive their stories from one source.
What you call "investigative journalism", I'd call propaganda. It's amazing how they can be so one-sided in their hatred, and still claim to be independent. How can you believe anything these people say?
Re:No integrity (Score:1, Informative)
I'm just going to post as AC as I get a strong sense this might be feeding the trolls, but here are two quick references (from Wikipedia, which is albeit not a journalistic source itself, though many of the citations for these articles are) which seem to dispute your interpretation of the above information.
Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WMDs_in_Iraq [wikipedia.org]
Saddam Hussein and al-Queda link allegations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_hussein_and_al_qaeda [wikipedia.org]
I was surprised at the amount of information in these articles myself (given Wikipedia's reputation) - how long would it take to gather all this together trying a search of past articles of the NY times, I wonder?