For roughly 20 years, the state of the newspaper trade has been dealing with 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. Just lately, one other disrupter started coming into small-town newsrooms – monetary corporations.
This Sunday on 60 Minutes, correspondent Jon Wertheim reviews on the monetary corporations crippling every day journals and weekly tribunes throughout the nation.
It is not 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.
“If you take away a venerable establishment like The Instances-Picayune you actually type of take away a chunk of the soul of a metropolis,” Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans on the time, mentioned to 60 Minutes.
Created in 1837 and named for the one Spanish coin it value 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 gained 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 think about.
“Delivering a newspaper, like, making it thump in your doorstep, it is a actually laborious enterprise. It is an costly enterprise,” mentioned David Carr, acclaimed columnist for the New York Instances and champion of media throughout the nation.
“What the Newhouses did is claimed, ‘You understand what? This solely actually works three days per week. So, let’s lower to these three days.’ That is when it pays,” Carr mentioned.
Due to the evolution of touchless expertise and the unignorable prices of printing and delivering every day newspapers, the brand new financial mannequin not favored a every day printed paper. Steve Newhouse, chairman of Advance Publications’ digital sector, introduced an enormous restructuring wherein the print version could be revealed on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, whereas the digital website could be the brand new house of the every day paper. In 2013, the main focus 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 came about.
“The good metal presses of The Instances-Picayune are largely silent now, diminished to working lower than half the time,” 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer mentioned 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?”