The Fate of Journalism

Whether going home to a rural town, small suburb or big city, Oxy students might be surprised to discover that their local newspapers cease to exist. A new study featured in the Editor & Publisher journal predicts that over the course of the next two years newspapers in major cities across the country may go bankrupt and out of business. The article "Several Cities Could Have No Daily Paper As Soon As 2010, Credit Rater Says," emphasizes a critical turning point in the newspaper industry.

Tough economic times have left working Americans pessimistic about the future of the business world. According to the report about the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment done by a credit rating firm in Chicago known as Fitch Ratings, "the newspaper industry is the most as risk of defaulting."

In fact, according to the Editor and Publisher article, "Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010." This grim outlook comes "as the newspaper industry struggles to reinvent its business model in the midst of an economic downturn and falling advertising," said Lorene Yue of the ChicagoBusiness.com. While the end appears to loom near for several papers nationwide, the crisis is not limited to small local papers.

Recent implications of the economic crisis, as well as the consequences of our shift to a more technologically inclined society, can be observed in widely circulated local and national newspapers. In recent months, job cuts, buyouts, and required days off without pay have been the consequences that face many papers nationwide according to Eric Alterman's article "Out of Print: The Death and Life of the American Newspaper" featured in The New Yorker. In early January, The Boston Globe - Boston's most circulated paper - announced its plans to reduce its payroll by 50 newsroom jobs or 12% of their news and editorial staff. According to the Boston Globe Business Team, the result of this staff reduction, the fifth since 2001, "is because the Globe, like newspapers everywhere, struggles with the migration of advertisers and readers to the Internet, consolidation of the retail industry, and a recession forecast to be the deepest in decades."

"The economic downturn hasn't helped," said Globe spokesman Bob Powers.

Many news companies like Gannett Co. and Tribune Co. have continued to trim their costs, and papers such as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel and The Rocky Mountain News - Colorado's oldest paper - were put up for sale. Other papers facing job cuts are The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, The Hartford Courant, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times, among others.

While the economy has played a drastic role in the decline of the newspaper industry, the role of technology - specifically the growth of the internet - has greatly impacted media in the United States for over ten years. As technology has become more advanced and easily accessible, the internet has presented the American public with a multitude of possibilities that transcend the traditional print newspaper of our past. Staying updated on local, national, or even global news can be free and does not even require one to ever pick up a paper, as there are several television news stations to pick from or internet resources to investigate. In fact, according to James Warren of The Atlantic, "newspaper penetration - the number of households looking at a paper - now amounts to less than 18 percent of the population, compared with 33 percent back in 1946."

In the past the newspaper industry has had to compete with the invention of the radio and television. Today, accessing news is as easy as typing a URL or search word into a web browser. To keep up with the high-speed trend, most newspapers and television news programs have created online counterparts. The development of online newspapers has decreased the popularity of print copies according to John Gardner of the Glenwood Springs Post Independent in the article "Newspaper industry facing huge challenges." While a decline in readership and circulation is problematic for the newspaper industry, advertisers are also targeting different sources - popular internet sites - that are soaking up the advertisement profit. This has further caused papers to lose revenue in an already tough economic situation.

In their article, The Boston Globe Business Team quotes Louis Ureneck, chairman of Boston University's Journalism Department saying, "These are the darkest days for newspapers. They have more readers than ever when you count online readers, but they have yet to figure out how to translate the interest in news on the Internet into revenue." In addition, new modes of news reading have developed in the form of mock television news shows (such as The Daily Show) and the online blog craze, where anyone can post anything and there are thousands of different blogs to choose from. These increasingly popular media sources have transformed the way many American's get their news and have created even more competition for more traditional news outlets.

Whatever an individual's preference, it is clear that technology has changed the course of journalism. As papers face more and more challenges daily, the Internet has been more successful than ever. In a February 4th, 2009 update by Daisy Whitney from TVWeek.com, a recent comScore report revealed that "web video viewership jumped 13% in December from the month before.The online audience measurement firm found that Internet users in the United States watched a record 14.3 billion online videos in December, a 13% rise from the previous month." While only focusing on one sector of the Internet, this study clearly demonstrates the Internet's popularity and sustainability as a resource that will continue to rise.