From: Presses stopped forever at 140+ papers in 2009
- The presses stopped forever at no less than 142 daily and weekly newspapers in 2009, a nearly threefold increase over the number of titles succumbing in the prior year.
- Though things might have been worse, the year was bleak enough for newspapers – and the newspaper workers who were among the more than 90,000 people who lost their jobs in the various print publishing industries in the last 12 months.
- Erica Smith has put a black pin on a map of the United States for just about every paper shuttered since 2008. Last year, the map contained 37 pins. This year, it was filled with 106 pins in every corner of the country, including several single pins representing the shutdown of multiple weeklies published by a common owner.
- In all, Smith tallied 142 daily and non-daily shutdowns in 2009, or 2.7 times more than the 53 papers she listed in 2008. At yearend 2008, there were 1,408 dailies published in the United States, according to the Newspaper Association of America.
(Or in other words, about 10 percent of the industry's titles went bust, not counting chains with multiple locations)
- The black pins include not only the high-profile Rocky Mountain News, but also such smaller dailies as the Tucson Citizen, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Baltimore Examiner and the East Iowa Herald. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Christian Science Monitor, the Ann Arbor News and Asian Week abandoned print in favor of scaled-back online operations in the hopes of carrying their franchises forward on the web.
- These one-time-only [cost cutting] savings cannot be replicated in future years and, in fact, may serve to weaken demand for the hollowed-0ut products now produced by most publishers. If advertising demand returns when the economy recovers, publishers may be able to reconstitute their publications to reinvigorate consumer and advertiser demand. The risk is that increasingly compelling interactive media, combined with the self-cannibalization of newspapers, have turned off many readers and advertisers forever.