When the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima the world gasped, and ran to the press. When the Pentagon Papers broke, The Washington Post was revered and the editors were praised as the gate-keepers of truth. The Zodiac killer found fame and terrorized an entire city for years within the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle.
The first thing people used to do every morning was pick up a newspaper. But times have changed. In recent years, publications like The Buffalo News have been experiencing a drop in circulation due to an increase in optional information sources, and are primed to become an endangered species.
The medium through which people get their news has always been evolving. The newest face of news providing media, the Internet, is quickly becoming the most popular. The Buffalo News is not the only publication that has experienced the loss of circulation and readership. The newspaper business has been in decline for 20 years, yet never before has the printed product been so jeopardized. The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) exclaims on their website that “newspapers are an opt in media in an opt out world.” With extinction looming over their heads, most newspapers, including The Buffalo News, have created online pages that allow browsers to read much of the same information that is provided in the newspaper, but this eliminates the profit brought in from sales of the printed product.
A six-month study conducted by the NAA, ending in September of 2006, revealed the average circulation of major newspapers fell 2.8 percent on weekdays and 3.4 percent on Sundays. The top selling newspaper in the United States, USA Today, fell only 1.3 percent, as opposed to The Los Angeles Times which fell 8 percent in the study period, or The Boston Globe which fell 11 percent. Overall, since 1998, Sunday newspaper readership has fallen 11 percent.
The Buffalo News has yet to experience such a dramatic loss, but the problem remains. The organization distributed their final issue of First Sunday, a Sunday magazine, on September 2, 2007. On the inside cover is their explanation. “The news, along with almost every other daily newspaper, has begun directing its resources into other areas of the paper and website to provide news and information which readers can locate more quickly and more often.”
The Buffalo News Suburban Editor, Bruce Andriatch, said “Every year we have a meeting called ‘the state of the news’ and [circulation] decline is a staple of that meeting. I don’t know of a paper that is not in decline.” He goes on to explain that anyone who is in the newspaper business and not concerned with the circulation problems with which newspapers are faced is not being very truthful.
In a recent interview for Frontline on PBS, Bill Keller, the editor of The New York Times, explained that, “at the moment, it’s the printed newspaper that pays most of the cost of my newsroom.” With circulation dropping, the quality of these newspapers could be in jeopardy.
With the dramatic decrease in newspaper circulation and readership, the question arises; where are people getting their news? Senior accounting major Joseph Goodfellow says that he relies on the Internet. “I never read the newspaper, but I go on The Buffalo News website,” said Goodfellow. He explained that it is more convenient to get on the Internet than to go out and buy a newspaper. “Our website gets a lot of traffic. It’s one of the more looked at websites in Western New York,” said Andriatch.
A study, conducted by Nielsen and Netratings, explained that 57.6 million people visited news websites, setting a new record. 36 percent of Internet users visited newspaper websites in the last quarter of 2006. The LA Times offers full access to their newspaper through the Internet, and The New York Times just recently opened the full contents of its newspaper, including the editorials and Times Select, to online readers.
As online news sources like Yahoo! News and Google News develop, journalism positions do not progress with them. These sites, along with other large online news providers, do not do any actual reporting. They rely on the large national publications to do the reporting for them. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, explained on Frontline how Google News relays information on its website. “We are actually critically dependent on the success of these newspapers. We don’t write the content; we’re not in the content business.” These large Internet news companies will regurgitate the key international or national stories already covered in The New York Times or Washington Post, but fall short when it comes to local coverage.
With total access to The Buffalo News online, editors are looking for new ways to keep readers coming back to their website or picking up their newspaper. “We try to put a heavier emphasis on suburban stories because most of the people who read The Buffalo News do not live in the city,” said Andriatch, “We are more interested in mixing stories than selling newspapers.”
Circulation is not the only source of revenue for newspaper companies. A large amount of money streams in through advertisement space and classifieds. With the rise of websites like craigslist.com and ebay.com, the classified section is shrinking and advertisement revenue, although more profitable in print than online, is moving towards the web. The ad business in print is still lucrative, but there are signs that this essential fiscal supply is dwindling. National newspaper revenue from advertisements was the lowest it has ever been in the month of February 2007, reported The New York Times. It experienced a 7.5 percent decline and the Wall Street Journal’s ad revenue was down an alarming ten percent. Although media CEOs declare that this is only one month’s report, this could be viewed as a trend-setting period for newspaper ads. The good news is, online advertising jumped 31.5 percent on newspaper websites last year.
The Internet is creating tough competition for newspapers, and a merger between the two is not profitable at this time, therefore creating a necessity for a printed copy.
As the Internet continues to flourish and more people are becoming familiar with it, there is no doubt that the amount of people obtaining their news off of the Internet will increase. The fear of editors around the country is that the newspaper business will become obsolete. One key difference between large online news sources and newspapers is the reporting, and the reliability of the information in the stories.
Often overlooked in this debate is the endless struggle of the smaller, alternative publications. Major advertisement revenues can be had in a more community-based publication such as Buffalo’s own Artvoice, which is plastered with bar promos and ads for movie premieres on every page. But with the recent success of online advertising and craigslist.com, those advertisements may be on their way out.
Another notorious publication native to Buffalo is The Beast. Claiming to be “America’s best fiend,” the content found inside is satirical and often offensive to those who do not appreciate the humor within its pages. Editor in Chief Allan Uthman explains why The Beast went from a free publication to two dollars a magazine. “We just weren’t making enough money.” He explains how he lost some of the advertisements in the magazine because of some of the issues they printed. “Jim’s Steak Out pulled their ads after we ran a cover story with Terry Schiavo on the cover, exclaiming, ‘America’s favorite vegetable.’” They also ran an advertisement that said, “If you don’t buy our ads, we’ll drown this baby.” “That was one that a lot of people got pissed at us for, and it wasn’t even a story, just an ad,” Uthman said.
It may seem to some that The Beast is biting the hand that feeds them, and according to Uthman, that’s absolutely true. “When I say to my publisher, ‘you know this is pretty offensive, this is really gonna piss people off’ he says, ‘Fuck ‘em, print it!’” He explains the mentality, saying “We’re not sellouts, we say what we want; it’s almost a suicide mission. I never thought Buffalo could support a paper that was so vicious and offensive.”
With the rise in high speed Internet access and the abilities of online editors to produce and publish stories on the Internet within hours, the entire news reporting business is changing, for better or worse. Deadlines are becoming more critical to journalists as online news sources don’t have to wait for a printing press and distributor to deliver the product they provide. As technology advances, once-crucial items like the typewriter have become virtually obsolete. It may be all too soon that the endangered newspaper joins the typewriter in becoming just another nostalgic memory in a bygone era of news reporting.
Both Uthman and Andriatch agree that there will always be a printed newspaper. “Eventually [the print product] may only be ten percent of the market. There is something to be said about the tactility of a newspaper. People will always want something to read when they’re riding the bus or in a café,” said Uthman. Almost every community has its own newspaper, however big or small, which should be some reassurance for those within the newspaper business. “The art of telling stories has existed a long time,” said Andriatch, “and people still need to get those stories. How people will get their information in the future is anybody’s guess.”
Jon Davenport is a senior political science major and Assistant Features Editor of Generation
