I love reading newspapers. But let’s be honest – they feature old news. We can get news now not only from television and radio but also from our computers and even our cell phones. And the newspapers can’t keep up.
Even newspaper blogs have a hard time keeping up with other blogs. The Orange County Register’s political blog, Total Buzz, isn’t even in the current Top 20 list of California political blogs, that is published weekly by BNN. And their opinion blog, Orange Punch, is ranked #12 at the moment. This blog and the other two big O.C. political blogs, are all ranked higher than both of the O.C. Register’s blogs. And we always are.
Now the two local newspapers in town are racing to fire their workers. “The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday announced plans to cut 250 positions across the company, including 150 positions in editorial, in a new effort to bring expenses into line with declining revenue. In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%,” according to the L.A. Times.
And “Facing steep declines in profit, the Orange County Register is laying off staff, reducing the amount of news in the paper and taking other steps to cut costs. Starting Thursday and continuing this week, staffers have been tapped on the shoulder and asked to leave. Management at the Register declined to comment Monday. Insiders estimated the number of layoffs would be 20 to 35. A dozen had already been laid off by Monday, including longtime reporters and a part-time artist,” according to the L.A. Times.
How is firing reporters and reducing the news contents in the O.C. Register and the L.A. Times going to improve these newspapers? It won’t – they will get worse now. And the announcements of more layoffs will likely prod even more readers to cancel their subscriptions. After all, you can read both newspapers online for free.
If there is any hope for the newspapers it lies in the Internet, but they still haven’t quite figured out how to turn those impressions into dollars. And advertisers have moved on in many cases, sinking their ad dollars into other marketing opportunities.
The real problem for newspapers is that they lost most of their classified advertising in the last few years to monster.com, ebay.com, craigslist.org and all those online personals and dating websites. And those classified ads were the most profitable ads that the newspapers published.
There is no going back for either the O.C. Register or the L.A. Times. They are looking into the abyss. I really can’t see how they are going to pull out of this mess, particularly with our economy mired in the Bush Depression.
Here’s a thought – why don’t the O.C. Register and the L.A. Times charge us for reading their news online? They could offer the first paragraph of each story for free, then you would have to log in as a subscriber to read the rest. Or they could even charge by the story! And maybe they could offer a deal where you agree to read an ad or view an ad video before you read the story – and then you may read the story for free.
We need our local newspapers. But now we are going to have to start worrying about what we will do when they are gone. I don’t trust the management at either the L.A. Times or the O.C. Register to solve this mess. They failed to see any of this coming and they acted too late to save themselves. I think they are doomed. In which case I’m glad I established the Orange Juice almost five years ago. I think it would be quite difficult to launch a new political blog in this environment.
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My answer to your question; All of the above.
We all have a part in the demise of newspapers. As well a share goes to the unions who priced themselves out of the market. Both in hourly wages and demands that staff levels be maintained even when production efficiency increased, and staff needs diminished. It’s not jus our local papers it’s nation wide.
The online availability has been the stumbling block for almost all forms of the broadcast and print news media.
Welcome to the new paperless world.
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it.
We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be!
We all know things are bad — worse than bad — they’re crazy.
It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”
Well, I’m not going to leave you alone.
I want you to get mad!
I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.
All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.
You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
“I’m as mad as hell,
and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”
I called it in 1992 at only 13 years old… print is dead.
I actually do know why and how this happened, why the print outlets are stuck in limbo, and how the only way for them to get out of it will hurt everyone.
In fact, I think I’ll explain it all in a post later this week…
SMS
I think it is the government that wants to be in everyone’s business, they want to screen what the newspapers print. There is so many things happening that go unreported, that is not news worthy. So they think, just like the reporter that told of the canvasses thrown away. Because that artist’s was not a community member contributing to the public good, the reporter was told that she should report on other notable community items. I think she was right to report about it!
I know that I used to like to open the paper and sit down and savor everything over a cup of coffee. But now I read it and I just get mad, because the articles leave you empty (it reminds me of the song “Is that all there is my love” then lets go dancing let’s bring out the booze and have a ball is that all there is? Same place same thing. I have found reading the OJB with the commentary and other notable links to news items leave me with something to think about, and expand my knowledge.
We all let it happen, a little at a time. The days of tangible reading is over there are no more reporters called scoop. I just feel for the people that do not have internet access will be less aware of what is happening around them.
Blogs such as this may be able to release a new development faster than a newspaper, but they haven’t even BEGUN to offer the kind of investigative journalism that newspapers are capable of. So to compare the two in a journalistic sense is a bit like apples and oranges.
Is all that blogs have to offer is that they tell us things faster? That’s not really enough for me. And so with the final death of newspapers and the transition to getting news on TV and the internet exclusively, blogs will become focused on more obscure, community-based developments and opinion.
I see blogs as a forum to discuss what is in the news. Just regular people posting up items for their friends to read and comment on.
I agree, that investigative journalism is VERY important and it is troubling that the newspapers appear to be in the throes of death. The LA Times has excellent writers and investigative reporters who consistently deliver good content. The New York Times is also another excellent resource for news and analysis. We subscribe to the Economist and I highly recommend that magazine for reporting facts and stories that are of premium relevance for understanding world news, economics and events.
We quit subscribing to the paper version of the news for several reasons. The most important one for us was the weekly waste of so much paper. MOST of the actual delivered newspaper was fluff and advertisements. It is much easier to go online and view the actual stories and investigative reports at a fraction of the time that it would take to read in the physical paper.
I do enjoy having a copy of the Sunday paper in my hand for a leisurely read over coffee 🙂
Craigs list is killing off the classified ads department in many of the local newspapers. That revenue stream is essential to keeping the overall paper alive. The tough economy has got to be digging into the advertising budgets of many businesses that have traditionally used the newspaper to target clients.
I don’t remember the last time I used a phone book or the classified ads to locate something that I wanted. Everything is done online. The pool of people who don’t use online is shrinking.
Newspapers will always be around.
Just because the managers and owners of a “business” have burned the candle at both ends and consumed their long term assets for short term profits and have nothing but an empty shell to show for it, does not make the printed word irrelevant.
20 years from now, heck even less than 10 years, the OJ blog and the others wild not even be remembered and all the was written (blogged) will be long forgotten.
But the local libraries will still have copies of the local printed newspapers in their archives for future historians to research for information on the past.
Cook,
Don’t be so sure of that. I heard that Matt Cunningham sold his blog for quite a bit of money, to the Red County Magazine publisher.
My personal theory is that blogs like mine and the Liberal OC will be absorbed by big media companies. They will likely tone down the product and make it more corporate.
And in the future no one will go to the libraries to look at newspaper archives. We can already do that online so that aspect of library services will be going away in the next few years.
Just to confirm the staff reductions in our local media let me share a current illustration.
Last Monday evening I posted a story relating to a request for a wage increase by several members of the Mission Viejo city council. In addition to the Juice post I sent copies of the post to the supervisors of the local edition of the OC Register. On Sat I received a thank you along with the following comment for “passing this info along” (which they had not seen.)
The email goes on to say that “I wanted to let you know that I appreciate you sharing tips with us. And I also encourage you to share them with the Register’s designated “watch dog” staff.
It also mentions that ..”as a community newspaper, the XXXXXX doesn’t always have the resources to do the ideas justice.”
Again that web site is:
http://www.ocregister.com/watchdog
While most of our city council was recently quoted in the same newspaper to say that all bloggers provide are “opinions” this is a great example that we can also break stories in our daily monitoring of events.
There is room in the world of communication for all of us. However, the level of individual participation will shift due to improvements in technology.
We will always have public libraries even though lately it seems that we are adding more computers than books. And without those newspapers, magazines or books, have would we ever be able to engage in investigative research on Google and Yahoo.
Neither of the OC’s hometown newspapers are unionized. Newspapers are notorious for raking in unbelievable profits over the decades and now they are faced with that share of the pie dwindling.