Contemporary & Old Media: A Perfect Storm Part I

In case you missed it, last week was a tsunami of media news washouts. Gloomy October brought us into an official Recession, The Global Financial Crisis became the top news story and these things are creating a perfect storm for media shake-ups.  The contemporary news scene is opening our brains to a sea change.  How are you swimmin' in it?

The almost-100 year-old Christian Science Monitor is ending its print edition daily and going online only, the first national newspaper to do so.  The Monitor’s print readers are, on average, in their sixties. Online, they are in their forties. Time Inc., the world’s largest magazine publisher (24 magazines in the U.S. including Time magazine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Money and Sports Illustrated), plans to cut 6 percent of its work force — more than 600 positions. Conde Nast is cutting 5% of all magazine staffs (this includes the New Yorker, Vanity  Fair, Wired, Glamour and others). The nation's largest metropolitan newspapers continue to suffer declines, ranging from almost 2 percent for The Washington Post (whose parent company also owns Newsweek), to 13.6 percent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the sputtering economy will probably only compound matters, according to Columbia Journalism Review.

And, it continues: the Tribune Co. had declared that it would reduce the newsroom of The Los Angeles Times by 75 more people, leaving it approximately half the size it was just seven years ago.  TV Guide was sold in October for one dollar.  That, alone, tells you something about the changing face of media.  The whole body is changing and media is getting skinnier. Even Playboy magazine is cutting costs, moving to a lighter weight paper.

Another NYTimes story this last week: Gannet, the nation's largest newspaper chain, will cut 10% of workers in the US as it profits slip.  The layoffs won't apply to USA Today but to the company's 84 other daily newspapers in the US and more than 800 small, non-daily local newspapers.  One NYTimes writer: Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

Editor and Publisher writes: Statistics show that baby boomers (those between 44 and 62), are the largest demographic of loyal print readers in the U.S. The only group that boasts a higher percentage in readership is people over the age of 62. According to an August report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the percentage of those who say they had read a newspaper on a given day has dropped from 50% in 1998 to 34% in 2008. 

I started studying the media changes in September as the media grabbed the "crisis" and played it out with headlines.  On September 30 the New York Sun ceased publication and by the end of October the first daily print newspaper went completely online.

And so go the changes...

continued: Contemporary & Old Media: A Perfect Storm Part II

Related stories:
Flickr:Part I: Sept. U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study ---Flickr:Part II: Oct. US Economic Crisis

Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$st Cri$i$ and Media--
Media Grabs the Big Story: Global Financial Crisis
The Art and Names of the Global Financial Crisis
How Now Brown (Economy)
Panic, Collapse & Meltdown overtake Crisis as Descriptive Word

Illustration: media mash-up based on Sea of the Brain by Yue Minjun, $4.8 million Hong Kong Dollars via Sotheby’s.

Comments

[anthony]

Companies are all struggling to make ends meet, and with the smaller the company, often the worse and more magnified the effects. Many are re-tooling for a new and different age. With the corporate tax rate the highest in the world, all of these people losing their jobs, companies (excepting oil) unable to make profits, and big money needed to re-tool and insure a future where jobs are available, makes you kind of wonder why Obama is so set on further raising the corporate taxes?

[Janet]

I've been wondering when the demise of the print media would start. I find it sad, even though I've expected it.

[Kay Dennison]

This is not doing good things for my health -- mental or physical -- and I'm hearing the same from a lot of other people. Look for a lot of deaths from stress-related illnesses in the coming months. AND if John McCain is elected he could be one of them.

[Kathy]

Have you seen the Newspaper Deathwatch blog? http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/

It's subtitle is:
"Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism."

Hopefully they're right about the rebirth of journalism, but I'm pessimistic on that front.

[Hattie]

Anthony: Yes. Let's just let corporations do what they want and not tax them but instead give them all our money to spend and we will have a utopia!
Foolishness aside, newspapers have been sliding along for years, and it is no wonder that new forms of communication are wiping them out.

[naomi dagen bloom]

So much denial about newspapers disappearing by older women I meet in NYC. Trying to get them using computers for more than email and travel tickets is a challenge.

Perhaps recent events have awakened them, though it's too late. The NY Times has shrunk locally--Metro merged into the rest of the paper rather than a separate section. Few weeks ago the conservative NY Sun breathed its last.

In very large cities there's still a need for focused local papers serving communities that need local news. Nothing at all where I live in Manhattan other than the student paper published via Columbia University.