Worst year for the newspaper industry
2005 WILL BE the newspaper industry’s worst year since the last ad industry recession. And things aren’t looking much better for next year either, according to a top Wall Street firm’s report on newspaper publishing.
“Sadly, 2005 is shaping up as the industry’s worst year from a revenue growth perspective since the recession impacted 2001-2002 period,” says the report from Goldman Sachs, adding a warning that meaningful growth in 2006 is “very unlikely.”
Blog community response:
“Declining circulation figures may not be simply a matter of people reading news and views from the Internet instead of the newspaper. During my years of teaching, I knew numerous students who made no effort to ‘keep up with current events.’…Authors of these pieces tend to assume that there will always be a market for traditional news outlets, but not only the Internet but changing consumer standards may be calling that assumption into serious question.”
“When I read that newspapers are being killed by the Internet, all I can think is good riddance. Centralized talk pieces that decide what’s important for us are antiquated and laughable in an age where we are approaching individual equality in publishing and collaboration…Budding journalists need not despair as there will always be an audience for good journalism, the lack of which is exactly why newspapers are dying.”
“What’s worse is the effect this will have on all media. TV and radio stations already have very slim news staffs. They rely on newspaper stories as the starting point for many of their own stories. As do magazines. And this will affect blogs as well, as they usually write about what’s been published elsewhere. News starts with reporters, and most of them work for newspapers. More people might prefer to read their news on the Internet, but with newspapers declining, there simply won’t be as many stories to read.”
–codemangler on Slashdot
Read todays newspapers in print layout here:
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I am not surprised. Newspapers have not adapted to the 21st century for the most part. What happened to all the hype of customized print newspapers that we were meant to have by now?
But one of the great victims of newspapers has been intelligence. Most write at an eight- to 11-year-old reading level. By doing the opposite—by catering to adults with a reading age of, say, 30—newspapers might just find themselves to be a source of knowledge. Just as first graders used to look up to eighth graders and their books with smaller type, and strove to get there.
The population still wants information and learning—but they are not finding it in newspapers.
Comment by Jack Yan — November 5, 2005 @ 7:20 am