In Berkeley, CA, the local high school newspaper will be the beneficiary of a $6,000 bailout collected by local residents. The gift to the school's newspaper with a school readership of around 3,000 students will sustain the newspaper for at least another year. Berkeley High's "The Jacket" has been feeling the economic crunch along with its larger, professional counterparts.
The Tribune Co., owner of twelve newspapers including the "LA Times" and "Chicago Tribune," has announced that it will cut ties with the venerable AP within two years. The Tribune Co. decision comes after other papers, including The "Star Tribune" of Minneapolis and "The Bakersfield Californian," also gave the required two-year notice of discontinuance. Spokane, WA paper "Spokesman Review" has decided to avoid the two-year notice and will faze out AP articles by the beginning of 2009.
It seemed to me that if anyone would weather the storm battering the newspaper industry, it would be the AP. The possibility of high school newspapers failing didn't even enter my mind, so far-fetched a possibility it seemed. That's like saying the church newsletter will fold because of lack of circulation and ad revenue (even though that is something that is happening as well, with churches moving their bulletins to the internet).
Is it possible that the crunch of the newspaper industry has nothing to do with revenue, but rather with a larger trend. Obviously the internet is playing a role in the demise of the newspaper, but my assumption had always been that the internet move was a symptom of the larger economic disease, not the other way around. Have newspapers become cliche to the point of irrelevance? I had always thought that it was the greed of the corporations and the high costs of producing a paper that would eventually kill the business, but could it be that we just don't want newspapers? The AP is the epitome of traditional news, with inverted pyramids, terse style and high journalistic standards. AP is the symbol for a united US press corp. It's the AP, for crying out loud! And if high school newspapers, which have never, ever, been for profit, can't stay afloat, especially in wealthy Alameda County, I mean, stammer, stammer...
I wonder if this is how they felt with, well, the last time a news medium died. I can't think of one. The radio is still around. TV is going strong. Maybe when the last town crier died? The AP isn't dead yet, but this is most certainly another nail in the coffin for newspapers.
2 comments:
I can't ever seeing the newspaper dying completely away, but I have seen the hardships that it is facing especially in high schools. My senior year I was editor of my high school newspaper and with hard work we were able to produce a newspaper monthly from the small amount of ad revenue we received. However, since I have been gone, I hear that they are only putting out a newspaper about every three months. I think that high school students are losing interest in the news that goes on around them and are losing interest in the newspaper. High school newspapers in particular will have to do a lot of promotional things and focus on their audiences interests in order to survive.
A town crier. Quaint.
But you have a point with that-what was the last news media to die? We don't really know-we've never really been in this situation before. And that's why I think we can pontificate all we want in Comms239 about the future of journalism, but maybe I'm forgetting something but I just don't think we have a precedent to base it off, therefore whatever we say is speculation. Perhaps we'd be aided by looking at the last form of communication and not just news reporting that went extinct, which was what, the telegraph? I'm not devastated by its loss. I think we've gotten along fine and better with radio/telephone/etc. I guess my only concern is, did the telegraphers did get good jobs somewhere else?
Post a Comment