Journalism not to blame for newspapers’ decline 2

Read­ing this piece from the Chicago Daily Observer, I just wanted to pick out a couple of points to rein­force my claim that journ­al­ism is not to blame for the decline of news­pa­pers. (Yes, I know poorly resourced news­pa­pers tend to pro­duce lousy journ­al­ism, but you’re miss­ing the point.)

The Daily News … couldn’t sur­vive the triple whammy of social, eco­nomic and demo­graphic change. The sales of after­noon dailies declined with the rise of tele­vi­sion and the move­ment of its read­ers to the sub­urbs. By the 1970s, with the decline of heavy industry, there were not as many people com­mut­ing to night-shift jobs, long the main read­ers of after­noon newspapers.

With the con­tin­ued exodus of the Daily News’ read­er­ship to the sub­urbs, dis­tri­bu­tion efforts were increas­ingly depend­ent on long rib­bons of con­crete that grew more and more con­ges­ted, mak­ing it ever more dif­fi­cult to deliver news­pa­per in a timely manner.

Former News staffer Alan Mut­ter was quoted:

I would have to say there is noth­ing — not improved con­tent, holo­graphic pic­tures or even free dental floss — that could have saved after­noon news­pa­pers from the com­pet­ing elec­tronic media and mod­ern com­mut­ing pat­terns, work styles and life styles … Times change and people move on. If media com­pan­ies don’t do so, they will lose. In the case of the [News], we out­lived our use­ful­ness and there was noth­ing to be done.

On his blog, Mut­ter re-posted this about the paper:

Its read­ers had moved on. On to the sub­urbs, where deliv­ery trucks couldn’t reach them with a paper that didn’t come off the press until after­noon. On to the sofa, where they favored Three’s Com­pany on television.

There were no home com­puters, no Inter­net, no iPods and no cell­phones to get between our read­ers and us in 1978. Still, cir­cu­la­tion dropped. The man­age­ment was changed. Cir­cu­la­tion dropped. We redesigned the paper. Cir­cu­la­tion dropped. We tinkered with the product. Cir­cu­la­tion dropped.

In the end, there was noth­ing left to do. Some 300 people lost their jobs, and Chicago lost a great newspaper.

Any more to be said?