Monday, March 23, 2009
Via Editor & Publisher:
CHICAGO — The Ann Arbor (Mich.) News, after 174 years, is folding in July and being replaced by “AnnArbor.com,” a new company that will publish a print newspaper twice a week and distribute a total market coverage (TMC) print product weekly, Publisher Laurel Champion told the newspaper’s staff Monday morning.
“While this is an incredibly difficult decision for us, this is by no means the end of local journalism in Ann Arbor,” Champion told the paper. The News is hosting community forums about AnnArbor.com on April 2 and 3.
The newspaper is owned by the Newhouse family’s Advance Newspapers.
Also today, three other newspapers owned by the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications — The Flint Journal, The Saginaw News and The Bay City Times — announced they are cutting print publication to three days a week starting June 1. Advance owns eight daily newspapers in Michigan.
Major announcements have also been scheduled at Newhouse’s dailies in Newark and Harrisburg, Pa. E&P has also confirmed that Advance is mandating 10-day furloughs and a pension freeze at nearly all of its papers (see separate story).
Editing and production work for Michigan’s four remaining Advance dailies — the Jackson Citizen Patriot, The Grand Rapids Press, the Kalamazoo Gazette and The Muskegon Chronicle — will be consolidated in Grand Rapids this summer, the Gazette reported.
Read the full story here.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Known as the P-I, and originally founded in 1863 as the weekly Seattle Gazette, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published daily in broadsheet format until ceasing print publication on March 17, 2009 and going online entirely.
The online version will cover mostly local news, with an editorial staff of only twenty people, less than one-seventh of the 150 staff that worked at the paper before the closure.
The P-I’s owner, the Hearst Corporation, put the 145-year old paper up for sale in early January of 2009, but was not able to find a suitable buyer with its 60 day self-imposed deadline.
When the sale was announced, it was also stated that if a buyer could not be found, the paper would either be closed, or reduced to an online-only publication with a much smaller staff.
The closure of P-I leaves the city with just one other daily, The Seattle Times.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
This story by Walter Isaacson appeared online February 5, 2009 and a few weeks later in the print edition of Time Magazine:
During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.
There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.
The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn’t see fit to charge for its content, I’d feel like a fool paying for it.
This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising was booming and every half-sentient publisher could pretend to be among the clan who “got it” by chanting the mantra that the ad-supported Web was “the future.” But when Web advertising declined in the fourth quarter of 2008, free felt like the future of journalism only in the sense that a steep cliff is the future for a herd of lemmings. (See who got the world into this financial mess.)
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can’t possibly stand.
Read the rest of the story here.
