New Jersey's largest daily newspaper ending print editions, but will continue online.  The owner of New Jersey's largest newspaper says it will stop publishing a daily print version of the paper early next year, but its online version will continue.  The Newark Morning Ledger Co. said the decision announced Wednesday was due to rising costs, decreasing circulation and reduced demand for print copies of the Star-Ledger.  The company also said it will close its Montville production facility in February 2025, the same time the newspaper's print version will cease.  The closing of that facility means another daily newspaper, The Jersey Journal, will cease publication on Feb. 1 after operating for 157 years.

The Editor says...
A newspaper without "print editions" is no longer a newspaper.  Amazon is not a bookstore.  Chewy is not a pet shop.  If an online business does not have a brick-and-mortar storefront, it is just a website.

Capitalism can save newspapers.  Publisher and columnist Adam Kelly is in the West Virginia journalism hall of fame despite being the most conservative man I ever met.  He asked me once if I knew what the purpose of a newspaper is.  His answer:  To make money for its owner.  What was true in 1982 is true today.  The Pulitzer-laden staffs of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post discovered this over the weekend when their owners vetoed endorsements of her majesty, Queen Kamala.  Likewise, the Hill reported, "Over 200 American outlets under USA Today parent company Gannett will not back candidates in presidential or national races," according to USA Today."  This sudden attempt to restore their virginity by newspapers may be because of the dumb-as-the-B-in-dumb Democrat candidate.  But it could be the fact that all these rags have failed Newspaper Rule No. 1, which is to make money for the owner.

Why so Many Newspapers Are Refusing to Endorse Kamala Harris.  [Scroll down]  Part of the explanation is marketplace attrition:  There are simply fewer newspapers around.  Their economic model has traditionally depended on ad revenue, and there's just not enough to keep everyone afloat.  In 2017, newspaper ad buys reached $10.34 billion.  In 2024, it's roughly $5.03 billion.  Fewer newspapers in the market mean fewer newspapers to offer endorsements.  Lots of jobs have vanished.  These are dark days in the newspaper industry.  For all the talk from The Washington Post about "Democracy Dies in Darkness," you know what else gets really dark?  Your newsroom if you can't pay the bills!  And that's been happening to newsrooms all over the country.

The Washington Post is in trouble.  The Washington Post's publisher and CEO, William Lewis, announced abruptly last Sunday night that Executive Editor Sally Buzbee had stepped down in response to a looming restructuring at the paper.  Owner Jeff Bezos demanded the shake-up because subscriptions have declined by half, and the outlet has lost $77 million in the last year alone.  While no layoffs have been publicly discussed at the Post, there have been waves of recent firings at other media outlets, and some have folded.  Journalism is in a shaky time — even at legacy giants like the Post — and the future of the industry is anything but solid.  With that as a backdrop, what's on the minds of the journalists at the Post?  Why, diversity numbers, of course, according to details of a staff meeting reported by the Post itself, Vanity Fair and others.  About the changes to the structure of the place, one Post reporter is quoted as saying, "We now have four white men running three newsrooms." [...] They've been told that their ship is sinking, but keeping track of the crew members' skin color is still their primary concern.  Instead of thinking about why they're headed toward the bottom of the ocean, they want to ensure the doomed officers are suitably diverse.

How 'Vice' Went from a $6 Billion Media Empire to Bankruptcy.  The beginning of the end came in 2017.  After a New York Times report exposed the supposedly sexually charged "boys' club" atmosphere at Vice — a magazine started by three boys in 1994 — a clutch of employees publicly condemned their employer for its past and demanded that the company that paid their salaries start acting like an entirely different company.  Vice co-founder and CEO Shane Smith, once a frequent presence in the New York office, retreated to his $50 million L.A. mansion and transferred control of the company to a female CEO, former A&E Networks head Nancy Dubuc.  A staff-wide email from Smith and fellow Vice co-founder Suroosh Alvi, sent hours before the Times story dropped, offered an expression of "extreme regret for our role in perpetuating sexism in the media industry and society in general," which rather overestimated the company's influence and overstated their sense of contrition.

Don't Blame Us.  We're Journalists.  Thus far, 2024 has not been a banner year if you want to be employed as a journalist in the mainstream media.  January featured layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, Time, National Geographic, and Business Insider.  Downsizing at cable news networks, usually unheard of in an election year, continues, and even National Public Radio has cut staff.  Many longtime reporters at places such as the Washington Post have taken buyouts as the newspaper struggles to restructure its business model. [...] The downward spiral is real.  According to the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, "total newspaper employment has decreased by 70 percent in the past fifteen years."  Major newspapers have cut back or eliminated their bureaus in Washington, D.C., and an increasing number of communities have no local newspaper at all.  Medill notes that 130 local papers shuttered last year alone.

Let newspapers die.  The total circulation of all newspapers in the United States is 20 million.  That is one newspaper sold for every 16 people.  Even if 3 people read each newspaper, that means more than 80% of the country does not read a newspaper.  Just 14 years ago circulation was 45 million.  Online readership for the top 50 newspapers topped 13 million in 2020 and slid below 9 million two years later.  Perhaps the return of President Trump to the ballot in November will restore the 13 million but even then newspaper circulation in print and online will reach only 33 million. [...] Total revenues are down from just under $50 billion in 2005 and 2006 to a little more than $20 billion today.  On Thursday, Tucker Carlson released his interview with Putin.  Within just a few hours, the interview attracted 100 million views.  By Saturday night, it topped 185 million views — which is 7 times the combined circulation of every newspaper in America.

The Liberal Media Is Getting Slaughtered.  I wish I could say it's a proper market correction because people were tired of their lies and fake news narratives being published, but it's not.  It might partially be due to that, but the ad bubble burst, and those days will never return.  The liberal media is bleeding all over, with some newsrooms being decimated over revenue issues.  As Axios wrote this morning, it's a "bloodbath."  We saw the first signs of this in the early 2010s when news outlets began curbing local beats.  Again, the gravy train was at its high point then, so most companies probably thought they could tread water, shifting all their energy to national news stories.  Alas, nothing lasts forever.  The LA Times has gutted one-third of its newsroom, with another 100-plus layoffs being announced on Tuesday.  Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and The Washington Post stare at disaster.  While the revenue issue is the first blow, the unionization of staff writers and employees at these outlets isn't helping[.]

Anyone in the media asking why?  The newsrooms from coast to coast are doing more "layoffs" than reporting these days: [...] Is anyone asking why?  Why aren't people reading or watching?  To be fair, a lot of people are cancelling newspaper subscriptions and getting their news from the internet.  Is it all about the internet or could they be fed up with media organizations that present the news from a certain point of view?  How about CNN?  Is anyone in that network asking questions about how an interview with the vice president gets ratings like that?  It was embarrassing.

What Really Killed Newspapers (Besides the Liberal Bias).  This has happened at The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, The Washington Post, and on and on and on. [...] Newspaper editors and reporters couldn't keep their personal political biases and their condescending attitudes toward their own readers out of their work.  There was the time one of my editors in Florida ordered a colleague of mine not to publish a story about Democrats voting early in the 2006 mid-term elections.  Doing so, my boss went on to say, might inspire Republicans to vote early too.  Oh, how that man hated Republicans.  And when the Democrats won big in those mid-terms, that same editor and my assistant editor high fived each other in the newsroom.  How unprofessional.  There was the time that same editor wrote an editorial calling our own readers racist for not wanting to take in and support illegal immigrants.  Not at all uncommon was to sit in a newsroom and hear other reporters compare conservatives (roughly half the population of the United States and, more importantly, potential subscribers to our product) to Nazis and Klan members.

The LA Times Appears to Be in a State of Imminent Collapse.  The Los Angeles Times has been around since 1881 and has survived enormous ups and downs over the past 142 years. [...] The Los Angeles-based newspaper started its downward slide in the late 2000s when it went through a series of calamities, including bankruptcy, ownership changes, an abnormally high attrition rate when it came to its editor and general staff, and with its biggest hiccup of moving from their historic headquarters building in downtown Los Angeles to a newer building in El Segundo which is located near the Los Angeles International Airport and giving the Times a new nickname of "The El Segundo Times."  The move came after the Times was purchased in 2018 by a South African billionaire and surgeon, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. [...] The critique of the leadership does not come without merit.  The Times has lost roughly $30 million annually since he took over with his activist daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong.  The Times is shedding editorial staff and general newsroom staff at an extremely concerning rate, whether by being laid off or outright quitting; the media giant has a historic attrition rate.

Visualizing The Top 25 US Newspapers By Daily Circulation.  [M]ost people today — more than 8 in 10 Americans — get their news via digital devices, doing their reading on apps, listening to podcasts, or scrolling through social media feeds.  It's no surprise then that over the last year, only one U.S. newspaper of the top 25 most popular in the country saw positive growth in their daily print circulations.  Based on data from Press Gazette, this visual stacks up the amount of daily newspapers different U.S. publications dole out and how that's changed year-over-year.  The most widely circulated physical newspaper is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by a long shot — sending out almost 700,000 copies a day.  But it is important to note that this number is an 11% decrease since 2021.

The Editor says...
The Wall Street Journal contains more actual paper than any newspaper I've ever seen, and is also the most expensive newspaper I've ever bought.  I subscribed for about a year, and reading the whole paper would have been a full-time job.

The Decline and Fall of Newspapers.  The most important point is the most obvious:  The changes are huge — and irreversible.  One recent study shows that in our country of 332 million people, no newspaper has a print circulation of more than 1 million.  Only nine have more than 100,000 subscribers.  Among the 25 largest papers, only one showed an increase in circulation, and it serves a retirement community.  It's shocking, really, that a paper with less than 50,000 subscribers is among the nation's largest.  The decline is relentless.  Print papers are losing one out of eight subscribers every year.  Their daily circulation, over 63 million at its peak in the 1980s, is now about one-third that size.  Over 25% of all American newspapers have died in the past 15 years.

Newspaper Giant Gannett Faces More Layoffs Amid Disastrous Quarter and Recession Fears.  In Louisiana, there are a handful of papers owned by Gannett.  With the exception of the one I worked with, the papers seemed to operate with skeleton crews.  A couple of reporters, sales staff, and a person in charge.  Local journalism involves wearing many hats, and those journalists are city reporters, education reporters, sports reporters, and lifestyle reporters all rolled into a single staff member.  Recent filings from Gannett show that things are only getting worse, however.

The Mainstream Media has committed Suicide with its COVID-19 Lies.  Newspaper circulations have been falling for years.  In 2003 I resigned as a columnist on The Sunday People newspaper after the editor refused to print a column I had written criticising the Iraq War.  The circulation then was 1.4 million.  Recent figures show that the circulation has fallen to 87,000 though it's probably lower than that now.  Britain's other newspapers have also seen their circulations fall.  And the collapse has been dramatic in the last two years — since the newspapers betrayed the public and sold their integrity for money from the Government and in some cases for a 'financial relationship' the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Today the national press has remarkably little influence.  In the two years from 2020 this is what has happened to newspaper circulations:
  The Daily Mail fell from 1,169,000 to 862,000.
  The Daily Mirror fell from 451,000 to 313,000
  The Express fell from 296,000 to 205,000
  The Star fell from 277,000 to 185,000
  The i fell from 217,000 to 137,000
  The Financial Times fell from 157,000 to 113,000
  The Guardian now keeps its circulation secret.  I don't blame them.

Our Incredible Media.  I've worked in and around newspapers and magazines for nearly 30 years.  I sometimes joke that if I had any knack for numbers — or had any basic sense — I wouldn't have gone into a dying industry that's more about subtraction than addition.  Fewer newspapers.  Fewer readers.  Fewer listeners.  Fewer jobs.  Lower revenues.  Less respect all the way around — and for good reason.  The only thing journalists possess in abundance is an overly high regard for what they do.  And if their diminished audience doesn't understand what an invaluable service they provide, whose fault is that?  The profession has struggled with a trust deficit for decades.

How the Media Polarized Us.  [Scroll down]  The Google-Facebook duopoly surpassed 60 percent of the share in the U.S. digital ad market in 2018. It became increasingly clear that old media had little chance of competing with digital platforms.  Ad revenue in the U.S. press hit rock-bottom in 2013, falling below the level of 1950, when the industry started measuring the print ad market.  In 2016, the Newspaper Association of America stopped reporting newspapers' annual ad revenue: this source of revenue had basically ceased to exist.  Residual advertising in print media, both offline and online, lost its industrial scale and any commercial meaning.  Today, advertising contracts in the media often resemble charity from ideologically aligned businesses.

A few years too late.
America's largest newspaper chain Gannett orders USA Today and other publications to roll back op-eds after 'repelling readers' with biased articles.  America's largest newspaper chain Gannett has instructed its newsrooms to scale back opinion pieces which are 'repelling readers' who do not want to be told what to do.  The newspaper chain owns the USA Today network which takes in hundreds of local newspapers in almost every state across the country.  At a recent editors committee meeting in April, editors said in a presentation:  "Readers don't want us to tell them what to think.["]

200+ Local Newspapers Sue Google and Facebook.  More than 200 newspapers across the U.S. have reportedly joined antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook over the past year.  The lawsuits claim that Facebook and Google have monopolized the digital ads market, taking revenue that should have gone to local news outlets.  Axios reports that newspapers across the United States have been joining antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook for the past year, claiming that the tech giants monopolized the online digital ads market and took revenue that would otherwise have gone to local news.

The Editor says...
How would newspapers run digital ads?  Isn't the absence of pop-up ads one of the few remaining reasons to buy a newspaper?  (At my house, reason #1 is that you can't line the bird cage with Facebook and Google.)

Gallup Poll:  Only 21 Percent of Americans Trust Newspapers.  We have been discussing the rapid decline of American journalism.  As news organizations adopt echo and advocacy journalism as models, the public has lost faith in the media as a source of information.  This is coming at a time when journalism professors are arguing for the abandonment of objectivity as the touchstone of the journalism.  The result is the death of American journalism as reporters frame the news to reaffirm their own views or that of insular groups.  That decline is reflected in chilling detail in a new Gallup poll.

Chicago Tribune downsizes their star columnist.  As the newspaper business collapses, even its stars — the kind of writers that people buy a newspaper specifically to read their work — are getting downsized.  And it's happened to John Kass, one of the best columnists in America, in the wake of his newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, being acquired by a hedge fund that is attempting to downsize its way to viability.

Silicon Valley Algorithm Manipulation Is The Only Thing Keeping Mainstream Media Alive.  The emergence of the internet was met with hope and enthusiasm by people who understood that the plutocrat-controlled mainstream media were manipulating public opinion to manufacture consent for the status quo.  The democratization of information-sharing was going to give rise to a public consciousness that is emancipated from the domination of plutocratic narrative control, thereby opening up the possibility of revolutionary change to our society's corrupt systems.  But it never happened.  Internet use has become commonplace around the world and humanity is able to network and share information like never before, yet we remain firmly under the thumb of the same power structures we've been ruled by for generations, both politically and psychologically.  Even the dominant media institutions are somehow still the same.  So what went wrong?  Nobody's buying newspapers anymore, and the audiences for television and radio are dwindling.  How is it possible that those same imperialist oligarchic institutions are still controlling the way most people think about their world?  The answer is algorithm manipulation.

Study Shows People Are Buying Newspapers — but Not to Read Them.  [Scroll down]  I mean, it's common knowledge that things in the journalism world are rough-going — across the board — right now.  Lay-offs, consolidations of staff, closings.  And that's especially true in print media: newspapers, magazines, and sundry other publications made primarily of wood pulp and ink.  It can't help morale, then, to learn the very people you're trying to reach with news content, and those important advertisements surrounding them, are instead using it to prep their weekend barbecue.  It almost sounds worse than that long-standing insult about using some newspaper you dislike to line your birdcage.  But, as fun and striking as that headline is, there's more than meets the eye in the Nieman Labs story.

Fast facts about the newspaper industry's financial struggles as McClatchy files for bankruptcy: 
  •   U.S. newspaper circulation fell in 2018 to its lowest level since 1940, the first year with available data.  Total daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) was an estimated 28.6 million for weekday and 30.8 million for Sunday in 2018.  Those numbers were down 8% and 9%, respectively, from the previous year.  Both figures are now below their lowest recorded levels, though weekday circulation first passed this threshold in 2013.
  •   Newspaper revenues declined dramatically between 2008 and 2018.  Advertising revenue fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, a 62% decline.
  •   Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.  Newspapers drove a broader decline in overall U.S. newsroom employment during that span.
  •   Layoffs continue to pummel U.S. newspapers.  Roughly a quarter (27%) of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018.  The layoffs came on top of the roughly one-third (31%) of papers in the same circulation range that experienced layoffs in 2017.  What's more, the number of jobs typically cut by newspapers in 2018 tended to be higher than in the year before.

The mainstream media's quandary ... and panic.  Although it was written back in October, the cry is still echoing throughout the mainstream media.  It comes from Hamilton Nolan, formerly at Gawker Media and now the public editor for the Washington Post. [...] The mainstream press is in a panic.  Its circulation and ad revenue may be falling as is its trustworthiness among the American people.  Plus, those readers the press still holds tend to be in an aging demographic.  They are not the future.  Younger people prefer Internet alternative news sources for their news source.  The growing alternative media which is taking big bites out of the legacy media's influence and revenue stream.

Democrats Want You to Pay the Media's Bills.  The media is dying.  Its business model is defunct.  Its bias has alienated most of the country.  In the latest Pew survey, the only group that still trusts the media are Democrats.  And while so many millions are out of work, Democrats are bailing out the media.  The wave of consolidations and bankruptcies is sweeping like a fire through major papers.  Cable news will be a casualty of demographics and the end of bundling.  The end of network television is less than a decade away.  Brand names like CNN and MSNBC will soon be where Time, Newsweek, and other news magazines ended up once subscriptions collapsed.  The media is dying, but it's not about to die gracefully.  It just needs to find money.  Lots of it.

The Daily News Is Now a Newspaper Without a Newsroom.  A tabloid once famous for its bustling, big-city newsroom no longer has a newsroom.  In a move that was almost unthinkable before the coronavirus pandemic, Tribune Publishing said on Wednesday that The Daily News, once the largest-circulation newspaper in the country, was permanently closing its physical newsroom at 4 New York Plaza in Lower Manhattan.  The same day, Tribune, the Chicago newspaper chain that has owned The News since 2017, told employees that it was closing four of its other newspapers' offices.

The Media's Political Suicide.  McClatchy had bought Knight Ridder for $4.4 billion to create the second largest news company.  After going into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, McClatchy was won in an auction by a hedge fund, which also owns the National Enquirer, in a secret bidding which started with $30 million cash and $270 million in debt.  None of this says anything good about the future of its D.C. bureau, or the Miami Herald, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, the Kansas City Star, and other hollowed out husks of major urban papers carrying huge loads of pension debt and even bigger loads of radical left-wing politics.

The Editor says...
The last time I bought a copy of the Star-Telegram, a/k/a the Startle-gram, it went straight to the bird cage.

Seattle Times, Tampa Bay Times, Axios receive coronavirus rescue loans.  The feds granted a trio of news outlets millions of dollars in small-business rescue loans as the coronavirus crisis battered the media industry.  The Seattle Times, the Tampa Bay Times and political news website Axios received multimillion-dollar, government-backed loans through the $349 billion Paycheck Protection Program, which aims to help small businesses retain jobs amid the pandemic.  The Seattle Times Co. got $9.9 million that will reportedly help its eponymous newspaper avoid laying off workers and cutting hours during the crisis, according to company president and chief financial officer Alan Fisco.

Kill Capitalism, Kill the Media.  The economic destruction of our government-imposed, nationwide (for the most part) shutdown has been unprecedented, widely felt, and well documented.  An overlooked example involves the media, specifically the newspapers. [...] As most well know, for a couple of decades now, newspapers across America have been on the decline.  Newspapers in Northeast Georgia have been no exception.  Since about half of newspaper revenue comes from advertising, the main reason small local newspapers are suffering now like never before is because this shutdown has so devastated small businesses, many of whom currently have little to no reason to advertise.

Please support local journalism.  Our industry is hurting, and we need you more than ever.  Today, the coronavirus is the latest challenge facing our industry, another body-blow that will thin the ranks of reporters, photographers, editors, sales representatives and production specialists at newspapers and websites across the country.  We learned of our cuts last week, even as our journalists were two months into some of the best work we have ever done.  Our parent company, Advance Local, announced furloughs and temporary pay cuts.  We also will temporarily lose the company's 401k match, but we avoided layoffs.

The Editor says...
It's time for "survival of the fittest."  If you put as much effort into gathering facts as you put into propaganda and left-wing activism, you'd have the support of the media marketplace.  You're "hurting more than ever" because you're more shamelessly biased and sensationalized than ever.  Here's an idea:  Before you shut down completely, sell newspapers that are mostly (or completely!) blank on the inside.  Just for bird cages and miscellaneous wrapping.  I am not kidding.

U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.  Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers continues to plummet, falling by around half since 2008, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.  But a modest increase in jobs after 2014 in other news-producing sectors — especially digital-native organizations — offset some of the losses at newspapers, helping to stabilize the overall number of U.S. newsroom employees in the last five years.  The years covered in the current analysis predate the spread of the coronavirus in the United States.  The economic effects of the virus have led to a fresh round of layoffs, pay cuts and other changes at U.S. media outlets, especially newspapers.

9 charts about America's newsrooms.  [#2] The number of newsroom employees at U.S. newspapers declined by 47% between 2008 and 2018.  The greatest decline in newsroom employment has occurred at newspapers.  The decline in overall newsroom employment has been driven primarily by one sector: newspapers.  The number of newspaper employees dropped by nearly half between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.  Only the digital-native news sector saw notable job growth during this period.  The number of digital-native newsroom employees increased by 82% between 2008 and 2018, from about 7,400 workers to about 13,500. This increase, however, fell far short of offsetting the loss of about 33,000 newspaper newsroom jobs.

US newspapers face 'extinction-level' crisis as Covid-19 hits hard.  As journalists across the US scramble to cover the impact of the coronavirus, they are grappling with a bitter irony: as demand for their stories soars, the decline of the business model that funds them is speeding up catastrophically.  The devastating sweep of Covid-19 is the biggest story in a generation, and for most newspapers and news sites it has triggered record numbers of readers.  Yet the virus, industry experts warn, will spell the end for "hundreds" of those organizations, laying off journalists and closing titles.  Media outlets across the US have already responded to a huge drop in advertising triggered by the economic shutdown by sacking scores of employees.

LA Times says ad revenue 'nearly eliminated' as it furloughs workers.  The Los Angeles Times, claiming "advertising revenue has been nearly eliminated" because of the coronavirus, said it will furlough business-side employees and slash pay for senior executives by 5 percent to 15 percent.  The furloughs are slated to start April 19 and will last up to 16 weeks, according to a memo from the newspaper's president, Chris Argentieri.  The company said it will also suspend 401(k) contributions for non-union employees.  The cuts also apply to the San Diego Union Tribune, but not the community weeklies, according to a spokesman for California Times, which also owns the LA Times.

The coronavirus crisis is devastating the news[paper] industry.  Two months ago, Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Brie Zeltner became consumed by one topic:  the coronavirus crisis that would soon sweep into her state. [...] Suffering a dramatic dip in advertising revenue amid the sudden economic downturn, the long-struggling newspaper cut 22 journalists from its payroll.  Among them, Zeltner. [...] The Tampa Bay Times laid off 11 journalists and stopped five days of its print edition.  Seattle's Pulitzer-winning weekly the Stranger laid off 18 staffers and stopped printing altogether.  There have been layoffs at the Denver Post and Boston Herald and salary cuts at the Dallas Morning News.  Some smaller papers are folding altogether.

$349B stimulus comes too late to save many newspapers.  The reeling US newspaper industry will be eligible to tap a portion of the $2 trillion stimulus package that contains $349 billion earmarked for small businesses.  But the potential rescue package comes too late to help dozens of newsrooms that have been slashing jobs as shuttered local businesses stop advertising.  News advertising has plummeted between 20 and 30 percent in the past two weeks compared to a year ago, according to the International News Media Association.  The Washingtonian stopped using freelancers, laid off all its fellows and instituted a 10 percent pay cut for surviving staffers.  The Austin Chronicle is moving from a weekly publication to one that publishes every other week, while the Portland Mercury in Oregon and The Stranger in Seattle suspended their print editions and laid off dozens of staffers.

Don't exempt the press.  While restaurants, hotels, factories, and movie theaters close across California, it is business as usual at the Sacramento Bee.  A worldwide pandemic [notwithstanding].  If California really wanted to flatten the curve instead of flattening the economy, McClatchy would be ordered to shutter its virus magnet presses and take a month off.  Small businesses across America have shut down.  Why not the Sacramento Bee?  What makes it so special? [...] We should not exempt them.  Newspapers have not been essential since the 1950s.  The public largely ignores them.  500 newspapers and magazines endorsed Hillary.  28 endorsed Donald John Trump.  Who became president?  Local TV stations can provide the news faster, more accurately, and without making a person break the quarantine to fetch the paper.

More Cleveland Plain Dealer layoffs hit ravaged newsroom.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the biggest newspaper in Ohio, is in the process of axing 22 journalists from its already ravaged newsroom — the latest dramatic downsizing of a major metro paper.  The paper is part of Advance Publications, the media empire owned by the billionaire Newhouse family that also owns Condé Nast.  The Plain Dealer News Guild blasted the move as "union busting," claiming it will be down to only 14 unionized editorial employees at the daily paper.  In the mid-1990s, it said there were still more than 340 people on the editorial side of the paper.

Amid coronavirus panic, Australian newspaper prints extra pages because of toilet paper shortage.  Toilet paper has been disappearing from shelves around the world as coronavirus-wary consumers stockpile emergency and household supplies.  A newspaper in Australia wants to help the #ToiletPaperCrisis or #ToiletPaperEmergency — as it's been dubbed on social media — and decided to print some extra pages in its editions.  "Yes, we actually did print it!" NT News, a Darwin-based newspaper, said in a tweet Thursday with a video showing a special eight-page insert that can be cut into toilet paper.

Newspapers drop endorsements.  In 2016, the Arizona Republic and Dallas Morning News attracted attention by breaking ranks from conservatives and endorsing Hillary, a Democrat.  Voters in their states overwhelmingly ignored the advice, and went for Donald John Trump.  Now both newspapers have announced they will no longer make political endorsements.

The Editor says...
In other words, the Dallas Morning News would like to endorse Bernie Sanders, but if they did, their circulation would collapse even more than it has already.

McClatchy Newspapers File for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection.  The McClatchy Company, the publisher of newspapers from the Miami Herald to the Kansas City Star, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.  The company, which oversees 30 local newsrooms, will continue to operate as usual while the company restructures under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the Associated Press reported.

Star-Telegram Owner Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.  McClatchy, the publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, and dozens of other newspapers, has filed for bankruptcy protection as it struggles to pay off debt while revenue shrinks because more readers and advertisers are going online.  McClatchy said Thursday [2/13/2020] that its 30 newspapers will continue to operate normally as it reorganizes under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, helped by $50 million in financing from Encina Business Credit.

It won't be the last time.
Newspaper Publisher McClatchy Skips Payment to Pensioners.  The McClatchy Co., the newspaper publisher that's teetering near bankruptcy, skipped a payment to some of its pensioners.  The company will not be releasing funds to a "small number" of participants in its Supplemental Executive Retirement Benefits plan as it addresses its long-term liquidity pressures, McClatchy said in a statement Thursday.  The company faces a mandatory $124 million contribution to its pension plan in 2020.  "This decision is not taken lightly, but at a time when the company is actively negotiating the future of the qualified pension plan, it would be inconsistent with our culture to continue payments on the non-qualified plans," Chief Financial Officer Elaine Lintecum said in the statement.

7,800 people have lost their jobs so far this year in a media landslide.  The media industry continued to execute cuts in December and November as Verizon, Gannett, Highsnobiety, and the CBC reduced headcounts.  The cuts followed large rounds of layoffs and buyouts earlier in the year from companies including BuzzFeed and Vice Media.  The massive cuts this year represent a recent trend in media that has seen upstart companies and newspapers alike shrinking and disappearing.

After Its Merger, Gannett Will Be the Largest Newspaper Publisher in the U.S..  Roughly one in four newspapers in the United States has closed since 2004, and many that managed to survive have been cut to the bone.  Now, more than 260 dailies will be controlled by the same company.  Shareholders voted on Thursday to approve a deal that would join the two largest newspaper chains in the United States, all but guaranteeing the creation of a newspaper colossus that is likely to result in thousands of layoffs.  The combination of GateHouse Media and Gannett — already the two largest newspaper owners in the country, by both number of papers and print circulation, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina — means that more than 550 newspapers, 300 of them weeklies, will have the same owner.

New York Times Ends its Spanish-Language Version.  The New York Times announced Tuesday [9/17/2019] that it would be shutting down its Spanish-language version, NYT en Espanol, according to The Hill.  A spokesperson for the Times confirmed to The Hill that the publication had "discontinued NYT en Espanol as a separate, standalone operation" after it had launched three years prior, admitting that "it did not prove financially successful."

Fishwrap: 33,000 newsroom jobs slashed, newspapers the last choice for news.  The ongoing shrinking of the old media industry and business model has resulted in the elimination of 33,000 newspaper jobs, and now, even big, new-age, digital outlets are facing pressure, according to a new analysis.  The Pew Fact Tank report is the latest portrayal of the difficulties faced in the news business and the reality that the explosion in online media has fallen far short of making up for the job losses in newspapers and magazines.  The worst news for the industry is that from 2008-2018, 33,000 newspaper jobs were axed.

Journalism Keeps Finding New And Creative Ways To Get Worse.  [W]hen Newsweek sold for a dollar a few years ago, that wasn't the warning it should have been to do their jobs better, it was the start of these once great institutions turned from important sources of information into a mirror on the Internet.  Printed versions of TIME and Newsweek have become harder find.  Grocery stores, many of which used to carry them in the checkout aisles, now don't carry them at all.  If you do manage to find a hard copy, what you find is a leaflet with almost no heft.  They're so thin, with so few pages, they can barely support their own weight. [...] TIME and Newsweek were once important, they used to do real, in-depth investigative journalism.  Their magazines were must-reads for people wanting a deep dive into the issues of the day.  Now there isn't enough to either to line a birdcage.

Newspapers are so vital that no one's buying them.  Salena Zito wrote in the New York Post, "The death of a local newspaper rocks America to its core." [...] But she didn't talk to any former readers.  Indeed she failed to mention the sudden drop in circulation.  Pew Research reported, "Total weekday circulation for U.S. daily newspapers fell to 35 million, while total Sunday circulation declined to 38 million — the lowest levels since 1945."  That was in 2016 amid the newsiest presidential election in 16 years.  People were not turning to their local newspaper for coverage and opinions about the election.  They used TV and the Internet to follow the race because the news was covered in real time with better graphics.

The Editor says...
I hope the Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers continue publication, because I have a cockatiel whose sanitation depends on them.

The death of a local newspaper rocks America to its core.  When the press stops rolling at The Vindicator this month, a lingering question will once again taunt the residents of the Mahoning Valley:  How much collapse can one region take?  The family-owned newspaper announced in June — just days after celebrating its 150th anniversary — that it is permanently ceasing production on Aug. 31.  The paper, which started in 1869 just months after Ulysses S. Grant was sworn into office, has been run by the descendants of William F. Maag ever since he purchased the paper midway through Grover Cleveland's first term.  The closure will cost 144 employees and 250 carriers their jobs and comes just weeks after the GM Lordstown plant down the road turned out the lights, leading to thousands of job losses.

More than 2,000 US newspapers have closed in past 15 years.  The newspaper industry has continued its relentless downward spiral, which started with the advent of the internet and accelerated during the Great Recession.  The pace of the decline has not slowed.  New research shows that over 2,000 newspapers have closed since 2004, a staggering figure given that the industry was once among the largest employers in America.

Journalists Failed Our Newspapers.  America's newspapers are dying, especially in the heartland.  New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet predicted recently that "most local newspapers are going to die in the next five years."  He called it the "greatest crisis in American journalism[.]"  It's certainly one of them.  Many of us would choose the mainstream media's historic loss of public trust and accountability as the greater, though Baquet, a major player in that crisis, would probably rather not discuss it.  Both crises do share one thing in common:  Journalists take no responsibility for either.

McClatchy stock sinks after reporting $42M loss.  McClatchy stock sank to a new 52-week low on Thursday [5/9/2019] after the company, which was feverishly trying to do a deal with the larger Tribune Publishing earlier this year, reported a net loss of $42 million in the first quarter as revenue tumbled 9.3 percent to $180.3 million.  McClatchy, owner of the Miami Herald, Kansas City Star and other papers, still had close to $745.1 million in debt on its books at the end of the quarter thanks in large part to its acquisition of Knight Ridder a dozen years ago.

Extra, Extra!  Newspapers Found Dying.  The [Wall Street] Journal, one of three major papers seemingly assured a long life — the others being The New York Times and The Washington Post — writes that "time is running out" for local franchises unable to compete with Google and Facebook for advertising revenue.  The market has shifted.  The internet brings you everything, not just what local editors have selected and arranged for you.  You choose now to believe or not believe, to read or not to read.  Such liberation from intellectual authority the world never before imagined.

They were all axed to leave.
Entire New Orleans' Times-Picayune staff axed after sale to competitor.  The Newhouse family sold the 182-year-old daily The Times-Picayune and its Web site, nola, to a scrappy New Orleans competitor, and the entire staff is being laid off.  That has stirred worries across the other papers in the family's Advance Publications empire.  A total of 161 staff members are being laid off, according to a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) notice filed with the Louisiana Workforce Commission, which listed 65 reporter and editor jobs in the bloodbath.

McClatchy Circling the Drain?  The slow collapse of the newspaper industry continues, for better or worse. [...] But McClatchy has brought its demise upon itself by publishing fake news, as Scott has described here and elsewhere.  McClatchy "reporters" Greg Gordon and Peter Stone published an obviously false story, with no support whatsoever, in order to advance the leftist, anti-Trump agenda.

Social Media Ad Spending to Outweigh Print Revenue by 2020.  The amount of money spent on advertising on social media is set to catch up with newspaper ad revenues by 2020, a leading forecaster said on Monday [1/28/2019].  The rapid expansion of social media platforms on mobile devices, as well as faster internet connectivity and more sophisticated technology, has triggered a huge shift in the way many people get their news.

Hedge fund called 'destroyer of newspapers' bids for USA Today owner Gannett.  A New York hedge fund known for gutting newsrooms is backing a hostile takeover bid for Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and 100 other newspapers.  The unsolicited offer, worth over $1.3 billion, would create the largest newspaper company in the United States and further consolidate a struggling industry.

Tough times for online media.  Websites are not yet going the way of newspapers, but financial stringency has arrived for web-based media, including American Thinker.  The carnage extends from independent voices to the big, investor-backed sites.  At the top end, the gold rush for staking claims to digital readership has gone bust, and the Big Money investors are licking their wounds after a number of changes have taken out much of money that flowed to digital publishers.

Five facts about the state of the news media in 2017.  [T]he circulation for U.S. daily newspapers, whose audience has been steadily declining for several decades, fell by 11% last year, according to an analysis of data from the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM).

Don't Cheer the Decline of the Newspaper Industry.  According to [a recent] Pew report, in 2008 there were 114,000 people employed in American newsrooms (this number includes the newsrooms of newspapers, radio, broadcast television, cable television, and digital news).  That number dropped to 88,000 in 2017, for a total loss of about 27,000 employees in newsrooms.  Newspapers took the largest hit, with newsroom employment dropping by a whopping 45 percent over the period, from 71,000 employees in 2008 to 39,000 in 2017, for a total loss of 32,000 jobs.  Digital news, meanwhile, which many wrongly assume to be replacing newspaper jobs, saw its newsroom employment increase by only 6,000 jobs.

'The Village Voice' is dead, shuts down and lays off half its staff.  After operating for more than 60 years, the Village Voice is shutting down.  The owner of the groundbreaking New York City publication, Peter Barbey, gave staff the news on Friday [8/31/2018].  "Today is kind of a [bad] day," he said, according to audio obtained by Gothamist.  "We're going to stop publishing Voice's material online."  The decision to close shop comes one year after the former alternative weekly newspaper went 100 percent digital as a last-ditch effort to stay afloat.

Daily News axes 5 more staffers.  The Daily News quietly showed five more staffers the door, pushing the number hit by the devastating mass layoffs to 98 people.  A New York state WARN notice filed this week listed the newest layoffs as members of "digital services," involved in putting together digital ads for advertisers.  The company laid off half of its newsroom July 23, hitting the photo and sports departments particularly hard.

The Children's Hour:  American Journalism Today.  Having thrown in its lot with #TheResistance, the media now faces its inevitable, if not actually imminent demise.  Jobs in the newspaper industry continue to disappear, as physical publishing becomes an increasingly unprofitable occupation and advertisers bail for greener pastures.  On television, ratings for the cellar-dwelling CNN — once the premier brand in the cable-news racket — are abysmal. [...] The reasons for the media's collapse include the rise of the internet and its instantaneous delivery system, the evaporation not only of its advertising revenue base, but of many of its former avenues of employment as well, including (from the newspaper days) linotype operators, printers, mailers, truck drivers, delivery boys, etc.  The democratization of publishing also has led to the withering of reporting staffs — the skills once prized and rewarded (news judgment, reporting, and writing ability) — matter increasingly less when, in a classic case of Gresham's Law, the amateur product is outwardly indistinguishable from that of the professional, so why pay for it when you can have it for free?

Study: Media Employment Down 23 Percent over Past Decade.  The number of employees working in the news media has declined 23 percent over the past decade, according to a Pew Research Center study released Monday [7/30/2018].  The Pew Research Center study found that 114,000 employees worked in the media industry — including in newspapers, cable, radio, and broadcast — in 2008, but that number fell by 23 percent to 88,000 employees in 2017. [...] Employment at newspapers dropped by 45 percent between 2008 and 2017.

Who killed the news?  Recently the New York Times accused Donald Trump of destroying journalism.  Describing a recent meeting at the White House A.G. Sulzberger wrote, "I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous. ... I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair.  Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country."  Actually Silicon Valley and not the White House has inflicted the most damage on journalism over the last decade.  The flight of advertising revenue to the Internet has devastated newsrooms all over America forcing even the NYT to charge readers for content.  From coast to coast every publication is desperately fleeing what the Atlantic called the media apocalypse.

Newsroom employment dropped nearly a quarter in less than 10 years, with greatest decline at newspapers.  Newsroom employment across the United States continues to decline, driven primarily by job losses at newspapers.  And even though digital-native news outlets have experienced some recent growth in employment, too few newsroom positions were added to make up for recent losses in the broader industry, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment Statistics survey data.  From 2008 to 2017, newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 23%.  In 2008, about 114,000 newsroom employees — reporters, editors, photographers and videographers — worked in five industries that produce news:  newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and "other information services" (the best match for digital-native news publishers).  By 2017, that number declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs.

Are there any newspapers left in New York?  Everyone chooses a side and the [New York] Post, which for years we've trusted as the most reliable source of information, has chosen the Hamas terrorists as its darlings.  This development is something new.  Something happened.  Over the past few months, to the surprise of we the readers, generally conservative, the paper has been trending anti-Israel and anti-Trump.  On WABC's Bernie and Sid in the Morning program, one of them asked if the Post had been sold.  No, it just seems that way.

Tronc Exec Tells Daily News Staff to Their Faces:  We Have No Strategy.  When a top executive from frugal newspaper giant Tronc was asked Tuesday [7/24/2018] about the specific strategy behind draconian cuts to the New York Daily News on Monday [7/23/2018], he didn't have an answer.  On Monday, the company slashed 50 percent of the editorial staff at one of New York's two remaining iconic tabloids, including dozens of top longtime staffers from virtually every section of the paper.

Newspapers in New York, Like Their Readers, Are Vanishing.  Once upon a time, The [New York] Daily News sold more than two million papers a day.  Now its circulation is only about a tenth of that, and the paper's non-hometown owner, the Chicago-based media company Tronc, which bought the paper last year, does not have the patience for non-profitability that the prior owner, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, did.

Layoffs at the Daily News mark a grim day for New York City.  Monday's [7/23/2018] mass layoffs at the Daily News are bad news for New York:  This town needs more good reporters, not fewer.  The numbers are brutal:  a newsroom staff slashed in half; no staff photographers at a place that long billed itself as "New York's Picture Newspaper."  A sports department down from 34 people to just nine — how can a New York tabloid survive with that?

Welcome to the Trump Schadenfreude List, New York Daily News.  The New York Daily News is the worst of the worst.  Its mean, vile, and nasty attacks of President Trump are without modern precedent and a bane on American journalism.  That not a single journalistic organization or professor called the Daily News out tells you all you need to know about this trade with pretensions of being a profession.

NY Daily News slashes newsroom staffing in half.  The New York tabloid Daily News cut half of its newsroom staff Monday including Jim Rich, the paper's editor in chief.

New York Daily News announces massive 50% cut to newsroom staff.  The New York Daily News announced a 50% cut to its editorial staff early on Monday, marking a tremendous blow to one of the most popular papers in New York City and in the US as a whole.  In an email circulated to staff, executives said they had been working hard to transform the paper into "a truly digital-focused enterprise" but that they "have not gone far enough".  Along with the 50% cut, the email said the paper will be refocusing on "breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility."

This Is How a Newspaper Dies.  For a preview of the newspaper industry's coming death, turn your gaze to Colorado, where the withering and emaciated Denver Post finds itself rolling in profits.  The Post's controlling owner, "vulture capitalist" Randall Smith, has become journalism's No. 1 villain for having cheapened and starved not just its Denver paper but many of the titles — including the St.  Paul Pioneer Press, the San Jose Mercury News and the Orange County Register — that his firm, Alden Global Capital, operates through the Digital First Media chain.  At the Post, Smith's firm cut the newsroom from 184 journalists to 99 between 2012 and 2017, Bloomberg News' Joe Nocera writes.  Over the same time, Smith's Pottstown Mercury fell from 73 journos to 10 while its Norristown Times-Herald went 45 to 12.  And the cuts just keep on coming.  For newspaper lovers, the cuts have been a disaster.

CNN's May Ratings Already Collapsing by 20-Plus Percent.  While Fox News and MSNBC are more or less holding steady this week when compared to the full month of May last year, the far-left CNN is already in a total ratings freefall by 20 percent and more.  With three weeks of May still remaining, the Stormy Daniels Network might be able to mount a comeback, but as of right now the month is looking like it could be a serious humiliation for CNN — and not just in total viewers but the advertiser-coveted 25-54 age demo, as well.

The Boston Herald filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold to GateHouse Media.  The Boston Herald is declaring bankruptcy and has agreed to be sold to GateHouse Media.  The daily newspaper founded in 1846 announced Friday [12/8/2017] it filed a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in Delaware.  Publisher Patrick Purcell didn't disclose the sale price but said the purchase is subject to court approval.  Purcell cited pension liabilities, declining revenue, digital media and growing competition for the decision.  He said the company would continue its day-to-day operations.

Boston Herald publisher announces sale of newspaper company.  Boston Herald Publisher Patrick J. Purcell announced today that the media company with its flagship Boston Herald tabloid has reached an agreement with GateHouse Media, LLC for them to acquire the company's operational assets.  The purchase is subject to court approval.

Daily News lost more than $90M over the last three years.  The floundering [New York] Daily News lost $90.4 million over the last three years — including $23.7 million of red ink in the year ended Dec. 25.  Revenue last year tumbled 14.2 percent, to $144.78 million, according to a regulatory filing on Monday [11/20/2017].  Paid print Monday-to-Friday circulation slipped to 182,472 in the second quarter, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

Why Newspapers Are Dying and Why Antitrust Can't Save Them.  The business of newspapers — for all the self-righteous talk about "the people's right to know," the First Amendment, and "afflicting the comfortable while comforting the afflicted" — is to sell advertising. [...] The problem newspapers have now is that — compared to web advertising — they're very expensive. [...] Google can deliver an ad for something like .04 percent of the cost, with 100 times better effect.

End newspaper subsidies.  The practice of posting legal notices in newspapers has been a billion-dollar boondoggle for newspapers since the 19th century.

New York Times reports 95.7 percent fall in quarterly profit.  The New York Times Co reported a 95.7 [percent] fall in quarterly profit, hit by restructuring charges related to headcount reductions.  Net profit attributable to the newspaper publisher fell to $406,000, or break-even per share, in the third quarter, from $9.4 million, or 6 cents per share, a year earlier.  Revenue fell to $363.6 million from $367.4 million.  The company, struggling to transition to digital, said online ad revenues grew 21.5 percent and now account for more than 35 percent of its advertising receipts.

Daily News employees brace for upcoming layoffs.  Daily News staffers are growing more nervous by the day.  New Editor-in-Chief Arthur "Chucky" Browne is said to be exploring a move of up to 40 jobs to a facility in the Jersey City printing plant.  In addition, 15 to 30 newsroom jobs at the struggling tabloid will be eliminated between Election Day and Thanksgiving, sources said.  The New Jersey news operation was supposed to be a temporary fix implemented in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which flooded the paper's Lower Manhattan office.

The Media Is Liberalism's Achilles Heel.  We need to help these Democrat shills in newspapers and on the networks join scrolls and town criers in the cesspool of history, where they'll be among friends.  The media is already dying, terminal due to new technology and its cancerous contempt for its audience.  So let's pull the plug.  Cancel your newspaper subscription, if you still have one.  And tell them why.  It has an effect.  Years ago I told the sad sack taking my LA Times cancellation that I was quitting because if I wanted to read Pravda I would prefer to do it in the original Russian.

Several newspapers that endorsed Hillary Clinton for president have taken huge subscriber hits.  The Arizona Republic, one of Arizona's largest newspapers, endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president last week.  The paper could have never imagined what followed.  According to the New York Times, who spoke with the paper's editorial page editor, the paper received cancellation calls every 10 minutes following the endorsement.

Endorsing Clinton Costs Newspapers Subscribers.  Newspapers that have traditionally endorsed Republicans for president are paying a financial price — cancelled subscriptions for crossing over and endorsing Democrat Hillary Clinton.  According to The New York Times, the cancellations were coming in every ten minutes at The Arizona Republic, which had never endorsed a Democrat for president in its 126-year history.

Dallas Paper Offers Discount In Scramble To End Hillary Endorsement Fallout.  The Dallas Morning News is offering massively discounted subscriptions to its readers in an effort to withstand the fallout caused by its editorial board's endorsement of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.  The endorsement has generated a lot of reader pushback in the form of angry comments, phone calls and vows to unsubscribe from the paper, which hasn't endorsed a Democrat in 75 years.  Editor Joe Wilson has acknowledged it came with a price of dropped subscriptions, but no one from the paper has revealed how many readers actually unsubscribed.

The Editor says...
It is difficult enough to keep a newspaper afloat in the 21st century, without stuff like this.  Dallas already has a left-wing propaganda rag competing for the attention of the far left.  The city doesn't need two of them.

Clinton endorsements by conservative newspapers spark threats, cancellations.  Over the past month, traditionally conservative newspaper editorial boards across the country have rejected Donald Trump and instead lined up behind Hillary Clinton — and some are facing vicious backlashes.  The Cincinnati Enquirer, which hadn't endorsed a Democrat in almost a century, and The Arizona Republic, which had backed only Republican presidential candidates in its 126-year history, said they had lost subscribers and received angry letters from readers since coming out in favor of Mrs. Clinton.

Newspapers rethink paywalls as digital efforts sputter.  Paywalls were supposed to help rescue newspapers from the crisis of sinking print circulation as readers shifted to getting their news online.  But with a few exceptions, they have failed to deliver much relief, prompting some news organizations to rethink their digital strategies.  Newspapers in the English-speaking world ended paywalls some 69 times through May 2015, including 41 temporary and 28 permanent drops, according to a study by University of Southern California researchers.

Is It Worth Reading a Newspaper Anymore?  The New York Times runs an editorial on "The NRA's Complicity in Terrorism," but the Orlando mass murderer Omar Mateen isn't a member of the NRA. He is a member of the Democratic Party, who voted for Obama twice, and worked as a subcontract security man for Homeland Security under Obama appointee Jeh Johnson.  The New York Times professes total confusion as to Mateen's motivation, while the same day Senator Charles Johnson, Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, described how Mateen had made over 16 calls in the four hours after the shooting inside The Pulse, while the police outside were presumably trying to decide who ordered the pepperoni and who the anchovies on their pizza while victims bled to death inside.  Several of Matteen's calls were specifically pledging his loyalty and service to ISIS, speaking to law enforcement at 911, and he made several postings of the same pledge to ISIS on his five accounts on Facebook.

The Editor says...
I bought a copy of the Dallas newspaper yesterday, but it went straight to the bird cage.

Sixty Percent of Newspaper Jobs Have Disappeared Since 1990.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics has confirmed what many of us already knew — newspaper jobs have disappeared at an alarming rate over the last 26 years.  According to the BLS, newspaper jobs fell from about 458,000 in 1990 to roughly 183,000 in March 2016, which is a drop of almost 60%.  Radio and broadcasting also saw losses — though not as steep as newspapers — with employment falling 27% from 1990 to 2016.  The job losses were partially offset by the rapid rise in Internet publishing and online broadcasting, from 30,000 to nearly 198,000.

New York Times plans to cut hundreds of jobs later this year.  The New York Times Co. is preparing to lay off a few hundred staffers in the second half of the year, The [New York] Post has learned.  Chairman and Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.'s management team has been talking with some of the Times' unions to come to a deal to provide reduced severance to those affected, sources told The Post.  "There's a goal of a couple of hundred people," said a source familiar with talks.  "They don't want to pay out big packages, and they're having negotiations with the unions."

Newspaper reporter rated worst job in America.  A new survey of the best and worst jobs in the country has declared that being a newspaper reporter is the worst career you could be pursuing.  CareerCast just published its Worst Jobs of 2016 list.  It cited fewer job prospects because of publications going out of business and declining ad revenue providing less money for decent salaries.  The survey put the annual median salary of a print reporter at $37,200.

Democracy's Destabilizer: TMI.  Over history, [Martin] Gurri argues, information has grown "in great pulses or waves" as technologies have changed — from writing to the alphabet to the printing press to mass media to today's digital networks.  Each of these great waves has brought with it new institutions and sometimes great political and social upheavals, most notably in the case of the printing press.  We are in the very early days of what he calls the Fifth Wave.  Institutions that developed in the age of industrialized, top-down mass media are losing legitimacy while new arrangements have yet to evolve.

The End of Academic Elites.  Even more so than the press, the internet has evaporated prior means of didactic instruction.  The printing press created change, but only the rich could afford to buy one.  For less than $100 today, one can get a domain and start a media empire on the web.  Kids now get their news from the internet.  Prior to YouTube, news came from "respected" media sources.  Now any kid with an iPhone can break a story.  In America, videos of police brutality have become a cottage industry, with attendant consequences.  I could have used an iPhone when I was a teen.  Craigslist has done a runaround on newspapers by offering free advertising, thus cutting their revenues.  Newsprint is collapsing.  Paper after paper has gone broke.  The Media Elite are gone.

ESPN Has Lost 7 Million Subscribers The Past Two Years.  According to a 10K filing from Disney today, which you can read here, ESPN now has 92 million subscribers.  That's a troubling number because just two years ago ESPN reported it had 99 million subscribers in the same 10k filing.  The last time ESPN had 92 million subscribers was 2006, so the past two years have erased the previous seven years of subscriber growth.  These filings are important because it's the first public acknowledgement of ESPN's massive subscriber losses.  Given that the average ESPN subscriber pays $6.61 a channel per month, this means that ESPN has lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $550 million in subscriber revenue per year since 2013.

Report: ESPN plans to cut 350 jobs.  The reduction of about 4.3% of its workforce could be announced early Wednesday [10/21/2015], the report said, citing unnamed sources.  ESPN declined to comment on the report.  The network has been battling rising programming costs and sluggish advertising sales as viewers increasingly ditch cable for streaming options.

Daily News lays off dozens more as newsroom keeps bleeding.  The [New York] Daily News swung the ax for a third day, putting the layoff tally for the teetering tabloid at close to 50 newsroom staffers.  Owner Mort Zuckerman's henchmen, who on Wednesday decimated sports by laying off nine writers and columnists, went after business and features on Thursday.  The business section, which had already been reduced to one page, will cease to exist after Friday [9/18/2015].

San Diego newspaper lays off 1/3rd of workforce after sale.  San Diego's dominant newspaper on Tuesday [5/26/2015] announced the layoffs of nearly a third of its 600 employees after it was acquired last week for $85 million by Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Publishing.

Media Fail: Arkansas Passes Religious Liberty Bill.  A religious liberty bill similar to the one causing a phony uproar in Indiana this week was just passed by Arkansas lawmakers Tuesday [3/31/2015] and serves as yet another sign of the left-wing mainstream media's waning power to intimidate and bully.  Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson said he is going to sign the bill, which will then offer the Faithful the same legal civil rights protections offered in 20 other states.  One of the primary reasons the media joined the political left in a coordinated and massive bullying misinformation campaign against Indiana was in an obvious attempt to intimidate other states from passing similar laws that give a legal standing to people of all faiths.  The fact that Arkansas moved forward unafraid shows that the heyday of the mainstream media is coming to an end.

USA Today Axes Dozens; Marched Out, Email Cut.  Up to 70 veteran USA Today journalists, editors, and others were laid off Wednesday [9/3/2014], and reports claim that the newly unemployed were "marched out by security" and within 15 minutes had their email accounts shut off.  The layoffs came as no surprise after the Gannett Company followed the lead of many other companies that have already separated and spun off their dying publishing business into separate companies.  It was only a few weeks ago that Gannett did the same.

Star-Ledger cuts 167 jobs, including 40 newsroom positions.  In a grim day of reckoning at the state's largest newspaper, the owners of The Star-Ledger today [4/3/2014] said they were eliminating the jobs of approximately 167 people, including 25 percent of the newsroom.  The sweeping job loss was part of a plan announced last week in an effort to greatly reduce costs and combine resources by consolidating the operations of The Star-Ledger, along with its sister publications in New Jersey and its online partner, NJ.com, which also announced cutbacks today.

Journalism's problem may not be the Internet.  Even in a supposedly prosperous and well-educated state like Connecticut, how strong can demand for those things be now that half the children are being raised without two parents at home and thus acquiring developmental handicaps; 70 percent of community college and state university freshmen have not mastered what used to be considered basic high school skills; poverty has risen steadily even as government appropriations in the name of remediating poverty have risen steadily; and democracy has sunk so much that half the eligible population isn't voting in presidential elections, 65 percent isn't voting in state elections, and 85 percent isn't voting in municipal elections?  This social disintegration and decline in civic engagement coincide with the decline of traditional journalism just as much as the rise of the Internet does.

Survey: 28% of Journalism Students Unhappy with Career Choice.  According to the study, 5 percent of journalism and mass communication graduates indicated they had selected the field without considering it.

Study: Journalism grads don't read newspapers, mags, books.  This could be the final blow to paper and ink news:  Reporters graduating out of journalism school and headed to work at newspapers and magazines don't read print media, with over seven of 10 choosing digital news and social media websites instead, the highest number ever, according to an authoritative new study.

Newspaper union: Plain Dealer in Cleveland cuts about one-third of newsroom staff.  The Plain Dealer in Cleveland cut about a third of its newsroom staff Wednesday, months after announcing it was reducing home delivery of the newspaper.

In SFO Air Disaster, Amateurs Lead Networks in Breaking News.  When it comes to breaking news on stories like Saturday's tragic Asiana jet crash at San Francisco airport, it's becoming increasingly clear that we've moved into a new era for journalism.

Gallup: Less Than One Fourth of Americans Trust Newspapers.  A new poll on newspapers and television news shows that Americans' confidence in the news industry continues to erode in this era of mass communications, reaching a low not seen since 2007. [...] Naturally, liberals trust newspapers more than conservatives.

The Real Reason that Readers Have Soured on Their Paper.  Last week Pew issued a report suggesting that journalism was entering a death spiral:  the loss of ad dollars, particularly for classified ads, has led newspapers to make cutbacks.  This causes a decline in quality, because writing a good story takes a lot of time and resources.  And the readers respond to the quality decline by cutting back on their subscriptions.

Print bloodbath: Human Events kills newspaper, dumps staff.  Human Events, for decades the lone national conservative newspaper before the Fox era, on Wednesday [2/27/2013] announced that the grim reaper killing off print publications around the nation has reached its door on Capitol Hill.  The Feb. 18 issue currently on the stands will be its last.  But Human Events, Ronald Reagan's fave, like the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News and Newsweek before it, will live on via the Internet, where it receives 1 million visitors a month.

Poll: Internet edges networks as public's source for news.  A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that traditional network news continues to fall as the nation's source for news.  The internet now is a bigger source of news for Americans than network TV, by a point, 25 percent to 24 percent.  Cable TV is still king, with 32 percent of the 1,000 likely voters Rasmussen polled getting their news from that source.  Newspapers barely register a 10 percent, and radio is the source of news for 7 percent of the country.

Clueless fops wonder why they're tanking.  Who in his right mind would ever buy The Boston Globe?  Maybe the physical plant of the "newspaper" on Morrissey Boulevard, but the actual product?  Let me put it another way:  When was the last time you bought an actual copy of The Boston Globe?

Time Inc. to Reduce Global Staff by 6 Percent.  Time Inc. joined the many news organizations trying to tighten their belts in a tough advertising climate by announcing layoffs and offering employees buyout packages on Wednesday [1/30/2013].  In a memo to the staff, Laura Lang, chief executive of Time Inc., said that she planned to reduce the company's worldwide staff of 8,000 employees by 6 percent, or about 480 employees.

Obama Economy Hits Reuters: Major Layoffs Announced.  Just as we saw last week at the New York Times and Time Magazine, the mainstream media's pro-Obama chickens are finally coming home to roost.  The media sold its soul to elect Barack Obama and then re-sold it to re-elect him.  This, even though his economic policies have been a stone cold disaster.  But now, in a fit of extremely satisfying karma, Reuters has joined the membership of high-profile, left-wing news outlets announcing a series of layoffs.

Star-Ledger announces layoffs of 34 employees, including 18 newsroom staff.  The Star-Ledger lost nearly 10 percent of its newsroom today [1/16/2013] as the state's largest newspaper cut editors, photographers, news clerks and others in its first ever large-scale layoff.  The jobs of 34 employees of the paper were eliminated, according to publisher Richard Vezza, who called it a "difficult day."

CNET Reporter Resigns Over CBS' Censorship.  One of the existential threats to broadcast and cable television is anything involving Internet streaming.  We the People are slowly but surely getting used to the idea of watching what we want, when we want.  And as people get used to this technology, the idea of flipping endlessly through expensive nothing-to-watch cable packages feels more outdated by the day.

'Gun Map' Newspaper in Circulation Free Fall.  Buried at the bottom of a New York Times piece might be the real reason to explain why New York's Journal News did something as sensationally stupid as publishing the names and addresses of over 30,000 legal gun owners living in two New York counties.  In just five years, the Journal News' Monday through Friday circulation rate has plummeted almost 40%, "from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012."

Extra! Extra! American Newspapers Don't Care about Reading  Newspapers need readers.  If children aren't learning to read, newspapers will struggle to survive.  What could be more obvious?  You might think that newspapers — as a simple matter of survival — would do anything possible to promote literacy.

R.I.P. Newsweek.  The beginning of the end for the longtime number two news magazine began when the Washington Post Co. sold the publication to audio electronics billionaire Sidney Harman two years ago for $1, plus the assumed liabilities. [...] But after suffering a reported $30 million in losses, Harman merged Newsweek with The Daily Beast hoping to take advantage of the digital savvy of the Beast and staunch the bleeding.

Chicago Tribune, Six Other Papers Drop Associated Press.  The Chicago Tribune has announced that starting in January, the Chicago-based paper and several other Tribune-owned papers will be dropping the Associated Press as its chief wire service.  Along with the Chicago paper, six other Tribune-owned papers will also be dropping the AP.

It Gets Even Worse for Newspapers.  It's been a hellish decade for members of the once-mighty newspaper industry, but down in Miami, the ink-stained wretches have just endured the deepest insult of all.  It is now official policy that the Miami Herald's long and powerful history of dominance over the Miami media is not worth preserving.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Cutting One-Third of Newsroom.  The Cleveland Plain Dealer is one of Ohio's biggest papers but neither size nor influence is likely to save the jobs of one-third of the paper's newsroom employees who are preparing for big cuts to hit as the new year begins.  Workers at the paper found out on Wednesday that 58 employees would likely be losing their jobs starting in 2013.

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2017 by Andrew K. Dart