There is no doubt that there are a lot of changes happening in the newspaper business – or perhaps I should say in the business of newspapers. For years now, we have been watching newspapers all around the country experience a decline in readership. What is the cause of this? Some, especially readers of this website, would like to say that it is exclusively due to the left-wing dogma of most newspaper editorial pages, along with the left-of-center bias that appears to come from most newspaper news rooms (see the most recent example of that here).
The reality is that while some people have stopped subscribing to newspapers for ideological reasons, the most likely suspect for the precipitous drop in readership is due primary to the way that people choose to get their news (I guess there could also be less people interested in getting the news, but I don’t have any data to support that). More and more people are using the internet – via their computers and cell phones – to get their information. I know from talking to some friends in the newspaper business that this was first felt by papers with a major drop in interest in paid classified advertisements. Between eBay, Craig’s List and other sites, that part of the newspaper business has been hurting for a while. Add to it the huge drop in print advertising revenue with shrinking readership, and the high overhead involved with running newspapers, and it’s no wonder that a venerable publication like the Rocky Mountain News (the 9th largest paper nationally by circulation), which had been in business for nearly 150 years, a couple of weeks ago shut its doors. Just yesterday there was a story about McClatchy Newspapers (which is the parent organization for the Sacramento Bee) announcing more layoffs and employees taking pay cuts.
I actually am bringing up this topic because of one unfortunate effect of this economic malaise in the newspaper business – which is a reduction in the number of reporters that are providing in-depth coverage of California state policy and politics. Most specifically, as the State Capitol bureaus of newspapers from up and down California shrink, there is an important “government watchdog” function of the media that is suffering.
This was highlighted to me because of a recent piece of solid investigative journalism by the Los Angeles Times – the kind of investigative reports that we used to see more frequently…
**There is more – click the link**
March 10th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Jon. We need to have the print media survive. While we as bloggers reach thousands via the Internet blogs along with Twitter and Facebook, the print media has circulation numbers that we simply cannot match. We need them to hold our elected officials accountable. It is true that investigative reporting is becoming a dying art form stricktly due to cutbacks in staff. This has been caused by the major drop off in classified ads along with the younger generation who get their news as you indicated above.
Sadly, I do not see a favorable picture for in-depth investigative reporting in the future.