I want to start a collection of the last editions of all of the major newspapers that cease publication from now on. I'm already behind. I need to see if someone has a copy of the last edition of the Rocky Mountain News (Feb. 27, 2009) and today's issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you have a copy you are willing to spare, I'd be happy to reimburse you for the cost of the paper and shipping. Post a comment here with a way to contact you, and we'll see if we can work something out.*Actually, it's not so much celebrating the death of newspapers as much as it is commemorating the industry's possible demise. I wanted to be a journalist from a fairly young age, and, even though I left the field after a few years of working in it, I'm still a bit sentimental about print journalism.
11 comments:
I'll try to find you a P-I during my lunch, assuming you don't already have one.
That'd be cool. I don't have one lined up yet.
It makes me sad. I'm not sure newspapers are going to recover after this recession is over.
I know. They were already hurting when the economy was artificially booming.
I do think that local papers will survive. It'll just be the major city papers that die. In towns that are too small to have local TV news and not a part of the metro area of a larger town, the local paper is the only source for local news.
They'll hurt with the local economy because of advertising, but when that ends, there's still a demand for them. For places like the paper where we used to work and the typical small town weekly, the local newspaper is the only widely consumed place to advertise locally.
The big cities have too many radio, TV and internet options. I think, with the exception of the national papers like the NYT and, unfortunately, the USA Today, big-city dailies are doomed.
Sorry, no luck at lunch. I'll try another place or two tonight, though.
Why would you buy the paper when you could just archive a digital copy?
Julie: That made me actually laugh out loud.
Woohoo! I made the funny!
Our TV stations are also in trouble thanks to the recession (no one can afford to advertise anymore). There honestly was a part of me that believed that South Africans would be unaffected. I'm so glad I work in government - at least my job is safe for now.
I too lament the passing of newspapers, but our local daily has responded to the squeeze by downsizing the format and cutting content. There's not much left there to miss.
Anymore when I read the paper the stories are already familiar to me from having read them the day before online. That's the way things go.
I hope you're right about local papers surviving. I agree with you that there'll be a demand for them, but I'm afraid some of them won't be able to survive financially to meet that demand. For example, our former employer, which so cleverly invested a couple million in a new printing press about two years ago --- I wouldn't put them on my safe and sound list just yet.
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