A Sad Day For Journalism

The Times-Picayune is a newspaper in New Orleans. Well known. Well regarded. It has always been the paper-of-record and served New Orleans heroically before, during and after Katrina.

The T-P is about to stop seven day a week print publication and shift to three. That’s what it’s come to. These are tough times for print. Readership is shrinking in an industry with high fixed costs.

The Times-Picayune is jettisoning jobs! 50 journalists will leave. The newsroom will shrink by a third.

The problem is newspapers are special. We really need them.

Newspapers are the true daily record of what’s going on around us. They are the history of everyday life. The stories they cover are often covered only by them.

Newspapers have room for more depth and perspective than TV (though we beat the crap out of them in emotion and immediacy).

It’s the power of a newspaper that you can see what’s important and understand the general order of things without reading any more than the headlines! Story location and size imply a great deal.

A generation has grown up getting their news online. They don’t read newspapers. Shame. It’s a different experience.

Just moving the news online doesn’t work. Advertisers value online readers differently.

This is a sad day for New Orleans and journalism.

7 thoughts on “A Sad Day For Journalism”

  1. I used to get the newspaper just on Sunday (I am a coupon addict). Then my husband got me a subscription to the Hartford Courant, now I read it daily……It is just not the same reading news online…..yes it can be instantaneous…but not always accurate….

  2. I’ve read our local newspaper since I was a kid – back when the Meriden paper had a morning AND afternoon paper (but no Sunday paper that didnt start until ’87). In addition my father bought the NY Daily News and on Sundays we got the Boston Herald (I think it was)! News from all over!
    I still read the Record Journal physical paper every day and if I’m away I read it online.
    It is a sad day when newspapers stop publishing.

  3. “Pulitizers don’t pay the mortgage”, and “we need your help to uncover the news” we’re two statements the Projo made in a radio campaign that reminded me that I value local news and that I am part of the news team (recommend stories, pay to read content).

    Many print media companies were so arrogant / lazy that they forgot how to connect to their customers. No emotional connection to the product = why should I pay?

  4. My biggest regret, living in rural eastern Virginia, is that I have no daily paper… I do subscribe to the local weekly (which is a *news* paper among other things). But neither the Richmond nor the Fredricksburg daily covers my part of VA.

    I do have a digital subscription to the NYTimes; I read it regularly on my tablet.

    Those of us who grew up reading print news don’t want to give it up.

    My daughter, who’s a voracious reader of books, has *never* read the paper, not even the funny pages, though she watched her parents read the NHRegister (Ragister?), the NY Daily News, the NY Times… and I grew up w/ the Phila Inquirer in the AM and the Phila Bulletin (RIP) in the afternoons.

  5. I have had the Connecticut Post newspaper for more than 20 years now and I read the New Haven Register as a kid. My kids never read the newspaper-it is a shame really. i do catch some online news too, but prefer the good old paper version.

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