The New Republic sings print media's swan song. TAP's founding co-editor Paul Starr bids adieu to the age of the newspaper:
Even before the recession hit, the newspaper industry was facing a mortal threat from the rise of the Internet, falling circulation and advertising revenue, and a long-term decline in readership, as the habit of buying a daily paper dwindled from one generation to the next. The recession has intensified these difficulties, plunging newspapers into a tailspin from which some may not recover and others will emerge only as a shadow of their former selves. The devastation is already substantial. At the Los Angeles Times, the cumulative effect of cutbacks has been to reduce its newsroom by one-half--and that was before its parent company, Tribune, declared bankruptcy…
Newspapers are also shrinking in numbers of pages, breadth of news coverage, features of various kinds, and home delivery of print editions. All over America, as newspaper revenues plummet--by the end of 2008, ad sales were down about 25 percent from three years earlier--publishers cannot seem to shed editors, reporters, and sections of their papers fast enough. And there is more pain to come.
On a related note, former Los Angeles Times writer Joe Mathews offers a personal and poignant reflection on why the print media on a local level. The tragedy is in the stories lost.
--The Editors
