Newspapers in decline

Bad news for the Watergate flagship.

Below is the first paragraph of a story in the Washington Post today. Depressing for those of us in the industry.

"The Washington Post Co. today reported an 86 percent decline in third-quarter earnings compared with the same period last year, as a significant loss at the flagship newspaper offset gains at the company's education and cable divisions."


I wasn't really planning to make my first post a report on the sad state of the industry, but as I was scrolling through my favorite Internet news sites just prior to creating this blog, the Washington Post story caught my eye.

The Post is not alone, of course. Everyone who pays any attention to the industry knows how things are going, from The New York Times to the LA Times and virtually every major metro in between.

I work for a mid-sized daily, which is still very profitable and actually growing circulation modestly. The large company that owns it has been good to its employees, and I'm happy to have worked it for much of my career. But the newspaper is now for sale, as are many other mid-sized papers in this country, according to an industry trade article I read just last week. The profitable papers are often sold to help pay off other debts or because the large companies that were once heavily into newspapers are looking more and more at other things. Take a look at the last part of the graph from the Post story. The losses in the newspaper division "offset gains at the company's education and cable divisions." Obviously, the money is no longer in applying ink to newsprint.

I'm posting this on a blog on the Internet because I believe the future is more and more on the Internet. But, for a long time, I also believed that much better informed minds than mine in the journalism industry were busily figuring out how to make Internet journalism work as a profitable venture. While I'm sure many suits in corporate board rooms have been and are still trying to figure it out, I no longer have much confidence they will find the magic bullet -- the ultimately successful formula. I now believe that it will be more a bottom-up discovery. Some 21st Century Ben Franklin -- or perhaps hundreds of them -- will find unique equations for dispersing news over the net and making money from it.

But what will that mean for journalism as we've come to know it? I don't know for sure, but I think it will change considerably. It already is.

More later.