The Demise Of The Newspaper

The demise of the newspaper comes from a lack of readers and advertisements to keep them from going under. This generation flocks more to online sources for their news information daily. while the hard copy newspaper might be failing, Internet news sites are soaring in viewers. There are many reasons why newspapers are failing including:

• Loss of advertisements to websites such as http://www.craigslist.com
• Online news sources who get info quicker to people
• The general loss in interest of newspapers

Newspapers are losing their advertising revenue because they have lost an audience. Advertising in newspapers make less sense now. Unfortunately advertising on the Internet does not make up for the loss of funds that the papers used to get. Employers don't advertise in the newspapers as often either because they have online websites to advertise on and reach a broader audience such as http://www.milwaukeejobs.com or http://www.monsterjobs.com. Because of this loss newspapers are trying new ways to save money and raise money. They are now dumping jobs to save more money. Some papers have also went to only delivering papers a couple of times a week.

Newspapers need to find a new business model because the current model is insufficient to meet the needs of the public. Since people are flocking more to the Internet for news you have journalist trying to navigate the Internet than actually doing their reporting and editing duties. Also you have high paid editors doing things they have no basic idea of doing. Because of this most web staffs for the Internet are understaffed and insufficient. It makes you wonder Who Put These Guys In Charge! http://www.najp.org/articles/2008/02/crisis-what-crisis.html. The way that the newspapers are trying to transfer their work from hard copy to an Internet news sources is very under funded and lacks knowledge.

One major newspaper that has failed has been the Tribune. The Tribune had to file for bankruptcy because of mounting debt and lack of funding from advertisements. Because of this, the company has been trying to sell off its more lucrative sub companies so that they can generate more funds. For more of the ways that The Tribune is trying to recover itself, visit http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/tribune-files-for-bankruptcy/. In official documents the Tribune has said that they are 13 billion dollars in debt. This is a tremendous amount of money. They are trying to save their skins but it is going to take a lot of work to rectify this situation.

The question I ask myself is how the newspaper industry couldn't see all of these issues coming to light sooner than later. Why wasn't it rectified or changed when issues started to arise? Things like this doesn't happen over night. I'm not the most knowledgeable woman in the world but I would know that if I see something declining and not working I would try to change it so that I wouldn't suffer in the end. Now the newspapers are scrambling trying to find new ways to do things and they are still failing. I never read newspapers so that tells you how much people really read them. I believe that hardly anybody of my generation reads them at all. Newspapers need to find a new way to do things and quickly.