T-rex Arms

By Secret Lion

This story, posted yesterday in Techcrunch, shows the scary dropoff in readership for the top 25 newspapers in the US. For example, USA Today, the McDonald’s of newspapers, dropped a stunning 17% in the past six months. The only paper to show any growth was the Wall Street Journal, with 0.61% over the past six months.

I’m no journalismologist. (If you want one of those, you could do worse than Jay Rosen at NYU). But one interesting thing about this article is that some of the top papers with large drops in circulation — USA Today, NY Daily News, NY Post — were tabloids or brief news summaries. Now, national profile is still important, which makes a sort of common sense. The NY Times, and Washington Post had some of the smallest drops, 5-7% range.  But that’s a very rarified position – the LA Times and Cleveland Plain-Dealer were next, with 11% – the cost of a decent second-tier rep. But being a kind of crappy urban daily was even worse — my hometown paper, the SF Chronicle, dropped 25.82%.  That’s murder yourself numbers. Other similar casualties – Houston Chronicle (17%), Boston Globe (18.5%), Dallas Morning News (22%), Newark Star Ledger (22%).

Numbers are bad all around. But I suspect that the WSJ is doing ok because it’s focused, and it owns its space. For daily news through a financial lens, there’s nowhere else to go.  NYT and WaPo also have strong national reps for breaking news — in particular, NYT owns culture, is strong internationally, and WaPo owns the Washingon beat. The LAT has Hollywood, but it’s not known for being incredibly strong on that, and faces competition from a lot of magazines/blogs that are more focused on it. So it slides more.

My hypothesis for the SF Chron and its ilk is that, unlike Cleveland, along with Detroit Free Press and others that only slid around 10%, they don’t cover their local area particularly well, and unlike the heavy hitters, they don’t have a national rep (for example, the San Jose Mercury News has generally better writing, and they own the Silicon Valley beat).  You’re going to see more crap, basically.  We could take a quick look at headlines and see if we can bear this out – I have, and at first glance  it seems to. In the interest of space I’m not going to list all of them here, but I encourage you to click some links and take a look. The papers with the largest drops had the least compelling front page news stories.

Maybe I’m building too simplistic a picture (as noted, me = not a newsmolologist), but there is something Darwinian happening here: the newspapers that take news and link it effectively to their readers’ environment, the ones that make connections and create insight, have seen less of a drop-off than those with half-hearted, less interesting headlines. I’ve chosen a shallow way of thinking about this for the purposes of an allegedly brief blog post — a single day of front pages. But the hypothesis holds true enough for me to keep an eye on it, and I’d encourage you to take a look at a random sampling of the aforementioned papers and see if you think this observation holds true. Use it to handicap papers that aren’t on this list, see who might not make it and who might live through the transition.

Whatever form it takes, the future of journalism will be predicated on journalists somehow doing what blogs, gutted papers, and fluffy magazines won’t: spending time understanding complex issues, breaking stories based on them, and communicating their findings in ways that grab our attention. One project addressing this is the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, which has set aside 1.75 million dollars to pay for veteran journalists to research in-depth stories, one of the key newspaper functions that the net has so far been unable to replicate (and here’s Rosen on the Investigative Fund and some of the potential implications).

But even the papers doing it right are not guaranteed to last in tangible form. Perhaps the last word on this tradition, is the one supplied by Xeni Jardin on Twitter:

From anon @boingboing commenter, the most succinct lulz summary yet in response to newspaper circ declines: “Goodnight, sweet prints.”