Extraordinary Observations

Andrew Sullivan knows that newspapers are dying... and fast:

Take the newspaper industry. It has been faltering badly under the pressure of new media for a few years. For much of the past decade, circulation for all papers has been declining at about 2% a year. The last year has been a test case of sorts. Newspapers had the story of a lifetime: an election campaign of historic interest, suspense, drama and personality. From Hil-lary to Barack, from John Edwards’s love child to Sarah Palin’s Down’s syndrome child, from John McCain’s wild lunges for relevance to the first black president, it was the kind of year in which circulation should have boomed. If you live for a story, this year was an embarrassment of riches.

And yet the decline didn’t just continue. It accelerated.

Between March and September the 500 biggest newspapers in America reported an average circulation decline of 4.6%. In six months. That’s close to a 10% decline per year. No newspapers showed any but fractional gains. It is therefore a near-certainty that many towns and cities in America will no longer have a newspaper after the down-turn. And that may apply not just to small names but to some big ones as well. The Los Angeles Times, for example, has gone from a circulation of 1.1m to 739,000 since the turn of the millennium. Its staff has been halved. Morale has never been lower.

Landmark names – the news equivalent of General Motors, Chrysler and Ford – are increasingly on the chopping block. The Chicago Tribune has seen its weekday circulation collapse by 8% in the past year. The Gannett company, which owns scores of papers, has announced a 10% cut in staff after a 5% reduction earlier this year. The Christian Science Monitor has gone from a daily to a website with a weekly print edition. The Rocky Mountain News is for sale. The profit margins of even the most established papers, such as The Washington Post and The New York Times, are so slim, the future looks extremely dodgy. Some analysts are even predicting that The New York Times will go belly up by the spring.

A huge chunk of blame is placed on the internet - with all the talented bloggers in the world, operating at costs well below those of newspapers; and with newspapers bringing in online ad revenue well below what they used to raise from print revenue, how can dead-tree media even begin to compete?

The part of the story that underlies this issue is that Generation Y just isn't into newspapers. Declining newspaper subscriptions are a combination of cancellations from people who have decided to get their content elsewhere, and young people who have never subscribed to a newspaper in their life and probably never will. It isn't that Generation Y isn't interested in the news, it's that newspaper aren't part of their culture. Land-line telephones face a similar fate. Those who grew up during a time when a telephone in the home was the only way to contact family and friends are more likely to have a subscription today. Those in Generation Y, who vaguely remember a time when you had to call a friend and ask the person's parents if they could come to the phone, perceive little value in ever subscribing to a telephone land-line.

The implication is still significant. Most individual bloggers simply don't have the time or resources to break stories or do truly investigative reporting; and in many cases, without newspapers, would have a lot less to say in general. Society has valued its news in the past, and was willing to pay a price for it. Newspapers are in a dark age, but the quest for news still exists; the key question is figuring out what value we are willing to pay for what little we have left.