No Country for Old Newspapers

The Albuquerque Tribune shut down today. As its own report of its demise mourn­fully notes:

The Trib’s daily cir­cu­la­tion in Janu­ary was about 9,600…In 1988, the news­pa­per sold about 42,000 cop­ies a day.

It was foun­ded by a muck­raker who came up with the motto for the Scripps news­pa­per chain: “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.” They cer­tainly found their way to illu­min­a­tion some­where other than news­pa­per stands.

The Tribune had 38 edit­or­ial employ­ees. On aver­age that means they were each pro­du­cing con­tent for about 250 people.

Has Albuquerque been shrink­ing? Nope. In 1990 the pop­u­la­tion was around 385,000. Today it stands at 455,000. So the Tribune has lost cir­cu­la­tion in a town where there were more poten­tial readers.

To gen­er­ate some more heat a few years ago it hired a con­ser­vat­ive colum­nist. This was prob­ably con­sidered an innov­a­tion. It didn’t work.

News­pa­per decline is not — as I’ve argued before — a con­tent thing. Journ­al­ist­ic­ally, the Tribune is prob­ably as good as it ever was, since it star­ted back in 1922.

The con­ser­vat­ive colum­nist reviews the Coen broth­ers’ latest offer­ing in his part­ing shot.

[O]né of the key story lines wind­ing through­out the movie is the rap­idly chan­ging nature of crime racing past Sher­iff Bell, a man from a long line of men who pledged to com­bat it. Bell was sadly and bril­liantly played by Tommy Lee Jones.

Set in 1980, Bell is hon­est, decent and polite. He fights fairly. He is, in essence, a dino­saur, as dated as a rotary phone, as out of fash­ion as a powder-blue leis­ure suit.

At one point in the movie, Bell is seated in a cof­fee shop read­ing a news­pa­per. No cell phone, no flat screen TVs, no laptops. Noth­ing but a cup of cof­fee and the pre­vi­ous day’s events afforded in cold black-and-white.

Just 28 years ago. The Stone Age.

Of course, the film is set in Texas, but most of it was shot in New Mex­ico. Budget­ary reasons.

Online read­ers offered their own valedictories:

• I don’t care for the envir­on­mental waste that comes from hav­ing a daily paper delivered, assum­ing I was there to pick it up every day, which I typ­ic­ally am not because I put in 70 to 80 hour work weeks.
• I … don’t care to pay to sift through gigantic wad of paper every day to find the two to three pages that aren’t spin or advert­ising. Most of what a news­pa­per is, is not actu­ally use­ful to me.
• It’s mostly advert­ise­ments, pun­ditry, spin, and gigantic amounts of inform­a­tion that really do belong online: page after page of clas­si­fied ads and stock prices that will be wildly out of date by the time any­one looks at them.
• No way am I will­ing to pay for a full Journal sub­scrip­tion to avoid those idi­otic on-line ads about some guy “sit­ting down to break­fast with the paper” as if any­one actu­ally does that any more. I can get news from nearly every other major city world­wide without hav­ing to do that.
• Say­on­ara, news in Albuquerque.