{"id":828,"date":"2008-02-23T07:20:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-23T13:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=828"},"modified":"2008-12-20T19:19:34","modified_gmt":"2008-12-20T19:19:34","slug":"no-country-for-old-newspapers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2008\/02\/no-country-for-old-newspapers\/","title":{"rendered":"No Country for Old Newspapers"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he Albuquerque Tribune<\/a> shut down today. As its own report of its demise mournfully notes:<\/p>\n

The Trib\u2019s daily circulation in January was about 9,600…In 1988, the newspaper sold about 42,000 copies a day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was founded by a muckraker who came up with the motto<\/a> for the Scripps newspaper chain: \u201cGive Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.\u201d They certainly found their way to illumination somewhere other than newspaper stands.<\/p>\n

The Tribune<\/em> had 38 editorial employees. On average that means they were each producing content for about 250 people.<\/p>\n

Has Albuquerque been shrinking? Nope<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

To generate some more heat a few years ago it hired a conservative columnist. This was probably considered an innovation. It didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

Newspaper decline is not – as I\u2019ve argued before<\/a> – a content thing. Journalistically, the Tribune<\/em> is probably as good as it ever was, since it started back in 1922.<\/p>\n

The conservative columnist reviews the Coen brothers\u2019 latest offering<\/a> in his parting shot.<\/p>\n

[O]ne 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s events afforded in cold black-and-white.<\/p>\n

Just 28 years ago. The Stone Age.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the film is set in Texas, but most of it was shot in New Mexico. Budgetary reasons.<\/p>\n

Online readers offered their own valedictories:<\/p>\n

\n
    \n
  • I don\u2019t 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.<\/li>\n
  • I … don\u2019t care to pay to sift through gigantic wad of paper every day to find the two to three pages that aren\u2019t spin or advertising. Most of what a newspaper is, is not actually useful to me.<\/li>\n
  • It\u2019s 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.<\/li>\n
  • No way am I willing to pay for a full Journal subscription to avoid those idiotic on-line ads about some guy \u201csitting down to breakfast with the paper\u201d as if anyone actually does that any more. I can get news from nearly every other major city worldwide without having to do that.<\/li>\n
  • Sayonara, news in Albuquerque.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The Albuquerque Tribune shut down today. As its own report of its demise mournfully notes: The Trib\u2019s 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: \u201cGive Light and the People […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=828"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2419,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828\/revisions\/2419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}