Even gung-ho newspaper executives are acquirement gloomy about the hereafter

by Jon Fine

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By this time next year, in that place’s a good chance that you won’t recognize your local big-city newspaper.

In early June, Jim Romenesko’s well-known journalism site posted a memo from Dave Butler, executive editor of the MediaNews Group’s San Jose Mercury News. In it, he discussed the prospect of significantly shrinking his bank-notes’s print editions on Mondays and Tuesdays, which are typically the mostly ad-starved days of the week. The Mercury News is not the only major daily nearing such a move, say newspaper executives elsewhere with firsthand knowledge of such deliberations. They say big metros also are discussing a wide range of other radical notions. Among them: making home deliveries merely without ceasing certain days of the week, shrinking additional weekday print editions, and even cutting out paid papers entirely on certain days of the week in favor of a smaller and free product. (The executives ground their Web sites will pick up the slack on days when the print impression is skimpier.)

These changes even exceed those mentioned by Randy Michaels, Tribune’s (TXA) principal operating functionary, who touched off a minor media uproar on June 5 when he said his group’s nine papers will lose around 500 news pages a week. Astonishing developments, totally. But then these are astonishing times. In a late report, Deutsche Bank (DB) algebraist Paul Ginocchio predicted that whole gazette income this year will drop 11.2%, on top of a 9.4% fall in ‘07. He also suggested that newspapers’ pricing power on certain classified ads is eroding—fallout, presumably, from the emergence of online players similar as craigslist. Meanwhile, costs are gruesome. Newsprint prices, the biggest expense for a gazette, could be as much as $200 per 240 pounds higher this overthrow than they were a year ago. The price of gas, too, has serious implications by reason of each industry that still distributes its fruits by the palletful (hence the proposed cuts in home delivery). In an address to the World Newspaper Congress on June 2, Dean Singleton, MediaNews’ chief charged with execution functionary, said that, in his estimation, 19 of the top 50 U.S. newspapers are loss money. And, he warned, “that number will continue to grow.”

“It’s reality,” a matter-of-fact Singleton subsequently told me. “You can’t dispose to the other side of the river unless you visage reality.”

This is for what cause I’m hearing things from senior gazette executives that I’ve never heard before. In making the matter of inquiry for compressing some print editions, one executive says: “We are putting out, in many cases, more journalism than anyone can consume in a given day.” This, he says, “procure[s] on a bit of a guilt factor” among readers who don’t acquire duration of one’s life for a long, leisurely morning read. Well, maybe, but I have power to’t imagine readers will feel they’re getting much bang for the buck if their daily papers shrink to the 10 pages they most care about.

There isn’t much maneuverability for the American city daily, that has taken the shock of the industry’s dislocations. As crazy as this formerly sounded, I’m now convinced one or more major American markets will lose their daily newspaper within 18 months. (Singleton and Rupert Murdoch, who perceive more from one place to another this than I do, agree conceptually, if not on the time frame.)

So it goes for the newspaper business. What, then, happens to news?

The optimistic case in point is raise in music. The universal predicament and availability of rock and pop are mushrooming for consumers even in the same manner through life gets worse for the traditive businesses at the center of the equation: major record labels.

But this metaphor isn’t extendable to news. While you can witness and distribute an album cheaply, more forms of journalism still take serious chunks of time, manpower, and resources to create. Now, I refuse to average newsroom cutbacks with the decease of news. For one thing, city media ecosystems have proven to have being vibrant things that constantly spawn new local and niche blogs. The best—not ever underestimate the voltage one potent reporter have power to generate—match or even outdo their orally transmitted rivals in frequent respects. But not all of them. Newspapers still do some things that can’t be replaced. Unfortunately, we’re about to find out exactly what those things are.