For roughly 20 years, the state of the newspaper business has been going through a gradual decline. A dramatic drop in readership, lack of advert income and the emergence of different types of media have posed main challenges for a lot of legacy print media publications. Lately, one other disrupter started coming into small-town newsrooms – monetary companies.
This Sunday on 60 Minutes, correspondent Jon Wertheim experiences on the monetary companies crippling each day journals and weekly tribunes throughout the nation.
It isn’t the primary time 60 Minutes has reported on the issues which have hampered native newsrooms within the twenty first century. In 2013, correspondent Morley Safer reported from New Orleans on the challenges confronted by the beloved paper The Instances-Picayune.
“Once you take away a venerable establishment like The Instances-Picayune you actually type of take away a bit of the soul of a metropolis,” Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans on the time, stated to 60 Minutes.
Created in 1837 and named for the one Spanish coin it price at its inception, The Instances-Picayune employed traditional American writers O. Henry and William Faulkner over the course of its historical past. In 2006 it received a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Although its affect on New Orleans was profound, Advance Publications, proprietor of the Instances-Picayune, had extra than simply the paper’s reporting to contemplate.
“Delivering a newspaper, like, making it thump in your doorstep, it is a actually arduous enterprise. It is an costly enterprise,” stated David Carr, acclaimed columnist for the New York Instances and champion of media throughout the nation.
“What the Newhouses did is alleged, ‘You realize what? This solely actually works three days per week. So, let’s reduce to these three days.’ That is when it pays,” Carr stated.
Due to the evolution of touchless know-how and the unignorable prices of printing and delivering each day newspapers, the brand new financial mannequin not favored a each day printed paper. Steve Newhouse, chairman of Advance Publications’ digital sector, introduced an enormous restructuring during which the print version can be revealed on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, whereas the digital web site can be the brand new house of the each day paper. In 2013, the main target of the Instances-Picayune shifted, and roughly 200 folks misplaced their jobs. Nevertheless it did not cease there.
In 2019, Advance Publications bought the paper to Georges Media, proprietor of the New Orleans Advocate. The 2 papers have been then mixed, and extra job cuts and company restructuring occurred.
“The nice metal presses of The Instances-Picayune are largely silent now, decreased to working lower than half the time,” 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer stated on the finish of his report.
“The query is: Will it turn out to be lower than half of what it as soon as was?”
This text was initially revealed on February 25, 2022.