There are Internet articles on the same subject. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News is out of business. The Chicago Tribune has declared bankruptcy. The company which owns the Chicago Tribune also owns the Los Angeles Times, six other metropolitan newspapers and twenty-three television stations – all with financial problems. 

The New York Times is in deepening financial trouble. The Miami Herald has been put up for sale. The list goes on and on.  

The New York Time’s Richard Perez-Pena (October 28, 2008) reported that a survey of 500 newspapers across the country had a drop in circulation of 4.6 percent. Among the most heavily hit were the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Star-Ledger of Newark, The Philadelphia Enquirer, The Orange County Register and The Detroit News. 

Similarly, a recent article (21 Jan 2009) commented on the loss of readership by Newsweek and Time magazines. Newsweek has dropped its “guaranteed” circulation to advertisers by half a million, Time has dropped its expected circulation by three fourths of a million. 

If you examine these figures in a different way, they become still more interesting. While those paying attention to the news media have been declining, the population has been increasing.  Several years ago, a local newspaper publisher told me that newspapers made their money from advertisements, not from readers and that his circulation had remained steady. But the population of the town had increased from approximately 100,000 to 300,000. Looking at readership as a percentage of population, he was selling about 1/3 of what he formerly sold. The same is true on a national level. When the New York Times reported that a survey of 400 newspapers reported an average drop in circulation of 4.6%, did they mean 4.6% of the newspapers sold or 4.6% of the potential audience? There is a big difference. 

Murdock, the major newspaper publisher, has proclaimed that “… there has never been more hunger for news …” That is true. But we are not getting it.

Too often the newspaper articles are inadequately researched or give a biased, one-sided account of the news. The worst papers print articles which are misleading or completely false. Didn’t a New York Times reporter receive a Pulitzer Prize for a “factual” article which turned out to be pure (but politically correct) fiction? Other newspapers have been found to have similar, if less sensational, problems as discovered by bloggers and reported on the Internet.

 Unfortunately, the majority of this imbalance favors “liberal,” or socialist political goals. When are we to receive complete and balanced reporting?  

 I believe that people will purchase and read newspapers which print news that interest and affect them. 

Our local, small town, newspaper had an editor for many years who routinely reported on the school board meetings, what was voted on and by whom and on county and city council meetings. He also printed articles submitted by our elected leaders, both state and national, in which they explained how and why they voted on different issues. It also, of course, included death notices, court reports and sports news along with other local news. People purchased and read that newspaper. Now, following a series of one or two year editors, half of the paper appears to be dedicated to high school sports with a few articles on local news and it has had a serious decline in readership. 

It is time for the “major” newspapers to accept that they cannot compete with the Internet for major, national and international news. We get that faster – and more accurately – on the Internet than it is possible for them to print it. Such stories are reported on an hourly basis. However, there are many area happenings which people would be interested in reading, and, I believe, would purchase newspapers in order to get learn what is happening in their area.  This is, basically, what the Washington Post and the Washington Times do, it is just that WashingtonDC “local” news affects all of us. Papers in other major cities do not have their advantage, but they could still report incidents of interest in their areas. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch does an excellent job of this. 

Another action major newspapers could take would be to provide thoughtful and fair analyses of the news on their editorial pages, provided they have persons capable of this. As a daily reader of the Wall Street Journal, I often find it reporting on events which I read about on the Internet the day before. However, their balanced editorial page, presenting thoughtful articles, keeps me reading, and purchasing, the paper.