A Fairwell to the Newspaper Industry?

The Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week. Last month the Tribune Co. took that walk. And everywhere you turn, you hear about newspapers struggling to make a dollar.

Like catalogers, newspapers have to deal with rising paper and ink prices, and (in most cases) transitioning to become forces in the online world. But newspapers (and magazines) also have to figure out how to bridge the revenue gap between sagging display ad sales and the tiny bit of revenue that can be made online.

It’s sad for me, because my origins are in the newspaper industry – and I actually lived through the shuttering of a Gannet newspaper in the early 1990s. I do some freelance sports writing for a group of weekly and daily newspapers in Southern Connecticut, and now that they’re all owned by the same group I can’t double-dip (write one version for the daily, one for the weekly) when the opportunity arises and get two checks.

But what’s worse is I see the sports writers at the games who are doing this as their choice of profession, and I know that soon they may be out of a job, wondering where to turn.

You hear about the auto industry bailout, but I’m surprised newspapers don’t band together and head to Washington to get down on their knees. We are talking about an entire industry that is failing to keep up with the times (no pun intended).

I posted a story about the Minneapolis Star Tribune to my Facebook page, and my old college buddy Brian Kelly had this to say (though he agrees it’s sad to see):

“Kind of hard to feel sympathy for an entire industry that has had ten or more years to figure out how to combat the loss of classified and so on to the Internet. They should have figured out how to carve online niches long ago.”

Yes, it’s very much like the auto industry. It didn’t adapt to its customer base, and turned out vehicles with rack-and-peanut steering when all America wanted was 40 MPG.

But the most sobering though my friend had was this:

“Here’s the problem in a nutshell. Since I read all my news online, my son has never seen a newspaper in my house.”

Could you imagine? Brian’s son watching a rerun of All In The Family and not knowing what that big white thing is that Archie’s looking at while Edith hands him a beer?

Another friend of mine, Corey Schwartz, shared this analysis he found online. Click here and scroll down to the comment by “eighteen.”

I’ll admit I’m not helping the situation, even though newsstand and home delivery costs are just a small fraction of the newspaper industry’s revenue. I canceled my subscription to the Connecticut Post in June of 2008, when I upgraded to a smart phone. The cost of the Internet package was about the same as the newspaper subscription, and the unread newspapers were piling up in my recycling bin.