Last Thursday, the reporters at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver were assigned to cover a local story about a company that was forced to close due to the weak economy. Nothing new, right?
Not exactly. The company that was going out of business was The Rocky Mountain News itself. It was shut down by it parent company after it failed to find a buyer for the paper. This leaves Denver with only one major paper, The Denver Post.
The recession is putting a strain on papers for many reasons. The primary one isn't lack of readership, but rather lack of advertising, which accounts for most of the revenue of a paper. Many businesses have been forced to cut advertising to either save money or if they go bankrupt.
Another reason, mentioned in the video on the paper's website, is that many people are getting their news from other sources, primarily websites and blogs. These sources, especially blogs, might provide the reader with more "personalized" news, or stories written in a less formal tone that the reader can connect to. However, blogs also present a biased view of stories, which might lead to a reader only viewing stories that fit his or her opinion. This is a problem, although personally I don't think the existence of opinionated blogs affected the newspaper as much as the lack of advertising. Proof of this is that on the paper's website, many of the reporters and columnists had blogs of their own!
Many newspapers have had to cut back in this economy. The New York Times merged its sports and local sections into its national and world sections. The Christian Science Monitor stopped printing altogether and now only exists online. Even our local newspaper was cut down from three to two sections a few months ago.
Until the economy improves, the newspaper business will be in trouble. Hopefully, though, no more major papers will be forced to close.
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