When the Capital Times, the daily newspaper serving Wisconsin’s capital city, Madison, announced it was “going paperless” recently, the story (briefly) attracted national attention.
I wonder whether a year from now, a similar announcement from, say, Lansing or Sacramento or Little Rock would even be covered outside of the direct community affected.
The move by the Times to a web-only format was so logical that in retrospect it was inevitable. Newspaper after newspaper seems likely to follow, all across the U.S., and around the world.
Meanwhile, the wave of layoffs sweeping through traditional newsrooms has become so commonplace that it no longer draws much notice, even when it’s the New York Times we’re talking about.
The gray lady reported that she will shed about 100 newsroom jobs this year, joining the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Diego Union-Tribune, USA Today, among many others all have announced major job cuts in the past year.
I’ve had industry veterans come to visit with me, asking, “What shall I do?” after four decades with one employer.
But the writing has been on the crit sheet, so to speak, for years. Circulation has fallen steadily, ad revenue is nose-diving, even as the costs of newsprint soars. Classified ads, once a profit center, have lost out to Craigslist and other online competitors.
Look for many more decisions to abandon the paper in “newspaper” in the next few years. The term itself seems destined to be lost to history, to be replaced by “news sites.”
