What’s to Become of The D&C?
Regular watchers of the state of the newsprint industry have watched with alarm as Big Media guts local newsrooms (like the D&C’s) and does other reactive actions to try to protect profit margins. This article gives a good 50,000 foot view of what that means:
with the advent of the corporate newspaper chains, the notion of “journalism” has taken a back seat to the pursuit of 30 percent profit margins. Newsrooms have been decimated. Investigative journalism has been slashed. “Serious” writing has been replaced with Brittany-style fluff. The product has become more vapid, less substantive. Local reporting has been replaced with cheaper (but soulless and generic) wire copy. Many newspapers would survive as stand-alone entities, but are being dragged down by over-leveraged corporate owners who’ve spent the last few years bleeding their media properties dry.
What the newspaper industry is trying to save right now isn’t “journalism”, it’s “shareholder value”.
Maybe paid content is good for journalism because it’s going to hasten the fall of this terrible system. It’s going to create a vacuum in which innovators will be able to make a difference. Maybe the best thing these old media companies can do today is fail quickly.
Newspaper circulation peaked in 1993 (combining daily and Sunday circulation) — before the blogs, before Google, before the web. Daily circulation peaked all the way back in 1985. The industry’s problems are certainly self-inflicted, no matter who they try to blame.
Given that, what’s going to happen to the D&C, ultimately, and what can we do to fill the gap?
I feel for the local journalists. As stlo7 put it:
I’m not blaming the reporters but Rochester isn’t shrinking - the newsroom is - so an already thin staff will be spread even thinner.
Yup.
Related posts:
I’m afraid the rot on the newspapers goes all the way down to the journalists at least on the west side.
Check out the dispute on the SCATS blog where Meaghan McDermott essentially y called people on the blog idiots.
The story that has just broken on the racial hiring case got some folks to send Meghan data on racial disparities in Greece schools. She simply dismissed the person who initiated the concern and contacted her. Folks feel that she will not listen or report Greece stories until it is too late.
In Gates and Chili The reporter there Ernst Lamonthe is widely regarded by town residents to be useless. he can’t even be bothered to attend town meetings.
Few of us will be surprised or care when the D and C is gone. Good riddance. They can’t go out of business fast enough.
What are newspapers providing the customer? Information in a user friendly (or at least user-accepted) format.
That information consists of news and opinion– local, national, sport, business; fluff; and advertisements.
Maybe it goes without saying, but everything but the local news is readily replaceable on the internet (though maybe not in as convenient a form factor). For the most part, the newspapers have stopped even trying to do anything original with the rest of the paper. National news, most of the national opinion pieces, editorial cartoons, national sports, advice columns, cartoons– they’re all pulled from syndication sources. Sources to which anyone with an internet connection has almost equal access as the newspaper.
Don’t most of us already access this information directly? Surf the web for our national news, major sports and entertainment news, syndicated columnists, and comic strips? Craigslist if you want to read classified advertisements?
So we’re missing local news: news, opinion, investigative reporting, calendar, sports, local venue reviews (restaurants, for instance).
But calendars can be replicated by piecing together organization and town calendars. Restaurant reviews are available on local-themed wikis. Local sports opinion is available on sports blogs; local political/current event opinions are here and at TAP.
So what real value do the local newspapers provide? Local investigative reporting.
And the irony is– that’s what they are busying slashing the most in order to “cut costs and save the paper”. That’s what they mean when they say “shrinking the newsroom”.
They are digging their own grave and claiming the deeper they make the hole, the better their chances…