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points by Spooky23 2 days ago | 0 comments

I was a daily newspaper reader in a midsized market for many years. The paper shrank in late 90s, early 2000s and stabilized around 2014. COVID killed the paper paper, I don't even know where you get it now.

Deregulation and consolidation started hurting the business in the 90s, the pure margin classified business started taking body blows ~2002 here (Craigslist wasn't everywhere) and salaries started tanking. Then the smart reporters flipped to PR.

The smartphone was the death blow as the sweet business of being an ad-delivery courier started to erode. Many people subscribed to the Thursday/Sunday paper to get the supermarket flyer and retail ads/coupons.

[–] paulpauper 2 days ago

But there is tons of newspapers still? And online publications? It's not like there is a shortage of news sites

[–] GolfPopper 2 days ago

How many of those newspapers are "skins", hollow shells that layer a newspaper shape (printed or virtual) over generic content with minimal human curation or editing?

I don't know the answer, but I'm confident it's non-zero, and probably higher that whatever my initial guess might be.

[–] AmVess 2 days ago

The largest city in the state I used to live in had two daily newspapers. Then it went to one, and some short years later went to none. It was resurrected a few years later, and now runs out of a strip mall. About 10 years ago, I managed to get a copy (I'd moved states), and it was two pages of state/local news, and the rest was filler.

They recently cut production down to 3 days a week and laid off half their already tiny staff.

[–] xp84 2 days ago

This is a very correct question to be asking. The Alden Global Capital guys have been pioneers of this, but are not the only ones of course. Of the papers you've heard of, they own a plurality of them. And what they are most known for is (of course, being PE) optimizing shareholder value. Firing people and replacing local content with wire stories and shared material from other papers in the portfolio.

Their current list of formerly great papers includes the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Boston Herald, The Mercury News, East Bay Times, The Orange County Register, and Orlando Sentinel.

They also bought my hometown daily paper, just a small, nowheresville town. The paper went from being respectably sized for a small town, and featuring many local news stories, to being slim and having one randomly selected story from one of the 5-8 papers they own in the region, and a bunch of wire stories. Once a week, they copy and paste the local police blotter.

The outlook on the news industry is exceedingly bleak. :(

[–] nunez 2 days ago

The show "The Paper" actually satirizes this. One bit involves pulling articles from an AP feed and putting it to print and how cutting that feed cut their largest revenue source, not that this means much as the paper is funded by a toilet paper company.

[–] Spooky23 2 days ago

There is but it’s a brutal dying business. Our little paper had like 20 reporters in the mid 90s.

Now like 5, who also do editorial, and make peanuts.

[–] jstrong 2 days ago

the internet made it ~free for anyone to publish to the whole world, which eviscerated the premium of space in the newspaper. it'd have been hard for newspapers to not get destroyed no matter what they did, but losing classifieds to fuckin' craigslist wasn't their finest moment, either.