The Declining American Newspaper: Buyouts At The Washington Post

Here’s the latest sign of how American newspapers have fallen on hard times:

More than 100 Washington Post reporters, editors, photographers, artists and other journalists will take early retirement packages offered by the company as a way to cut costs, reducing the newsroom staff by at least 10 percent.

A number of familiar bylines will leave for good or no longer appear regularly in the paper….Political dean David Broder took the package but will remain on contract; his column will continue to appear in The Post.

I missed this era by more than a decade. Since then, Knight Ridder, the once-great newspaper chain for which I first proudly worked (TMV co blogger Shaun Mullen had been a reporter and editor for a big city KRN newspaper) bit the dust. My alma mater The San Diego Union merged with the evening Tribune and there have been various buyouts there over the years.

You can give all kinds of reasons about why this is happening but here is a key one:

Young people do NOT read newspapers and it’s less and less with each generation and sub-generation. Talk to young people (teens, twenty-somethings) and you’ll find a lot of them don’t read papers unless they need to find the time a movie is being shown — and they will go online first for that, too. Even comics: offer most kids a comics page and they’ll make a face and nod their heads “no.”

There is a bigger concern, however. This isn’t just a matter of the decline of a longtime information source. Newspapers still remain the biggest source of fact-based reporting. Most blogs are essentially extended op-ed pages. Online websites are increasing in popularity. But many on-line websites are fueled and linked to content anchored in newspapers and magazine’s. And blogs: how many blogs could exist for ONE DAY without linking to, quoting and discussing something written by a staffer of a newspaper, network or magazine?

And magazines? Years ago the Publisher’s Clearinghouse offered tons of magazines. Now it’s offering kitchen, home items, etc. Magazines are oh, so 20th century…

Will newspapers disappear? Probably not, despite what naysayers say (a bloated-with-self-importance UCLA journalism professor told me in 1982 that newspapers would be dead in 10 years, that I was a “dinosaur” because newspapers would be replaced by cable-delivered daily newspapers).

But they will evolve and part of the evolution now is watching them, sadly, inexorably shrink as they try to find a better way….and find it so young readers will read them.