Peter Coleman: Tearing up America's trail of carnage and disaster

Nov 02, 2020 at 08:47 pm by Staff


By the time you've got to the end of today's News&Tech newsletter, it's hard not to find yourself getting a little emotional at the state of the US newspaper industry.

It's all bad news, almost without relief, for print publishers from the US trade publication. A Pew study of six public newspaper companies showed advertising revenue fell 42 per cent, year-on-year, in the second quarter of 2020, while that for some major news networks grew, by 41 per cent in the case of Fox News.

There's also a new report on the threats to local journalism; the efforts by DRUPA organisers that the show should go on virtually, even as vendors continue to abandon next year's postponed actual event; and a catalogue of closures.

In Mason City, Iowa, current owners Lee Enterprises are putting the Globe Gazette's building up for sale, printing having already been moved out to Des Moines.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, the now non-profit daily Tribune is to become a mail-delivered weekly and end the 88-year operating collaboration it has had with the Mormons' Deseret News, which is also going from daily to a "reimagined" weekly and a new monthly.

Gannett, which owns the Courier-Tribune in Asheboro, North Carolina, is killing its Thrive magazine and other titles, not because of COVID but because of "changing roles and goals" and because "print publications are very expensive to produce".

New roles, too, for former printing plants: In Kewaunee, Illinois, Gannett is also selling the Star Courier building to a towing company, although readers have been promised they "won't see any change in coverage or service" with staff still operating from offices in the building.

And Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and is expected to be the world's first trillionaire in 2026, has bought the former Orange County Register works in Santa Ana, California, from a developer, with plans to demolish it and build an Amazon distribution centre on the almost 17 acre (6.88 hectare) site. Digital First Media runs the Register's newsroom from Anaheim, after buying the bankrupt paper in 2016.

News&Tech links to the final issue of 41-year-old free weekly City Pages in the twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, headlined, 'City Pages is dead. We had a good run'. And they did, as the reminiscences of "the edit staffers who rearranged those Titanic deckchairs right up until the very end" confirms. "What else is there to say? We're sad as f**k," says the music and arts and culture paper, owned by Star Tribune Media. Quarantines, restrictions and closures from COVID-19 are credited with disrupting the restaurants, clubs, theatres, museums and other venues which were the core of its revenue.

Meanwhile News&Tech - which belongs to a newspaper company - hangs in there (or hopefully better), as do we, thanks to the support of a tiny band of loyal advertisers - take a bow, manroland|Goss, ABB and HilcoGlobal ANZ - and perversely thankful that at least our international travel costs are cut.

Australia's trail of closures may have come in bigger chunks - possibly because of the concentrated ownership structure here - and is no less sad, perhaps for that reason alone.

• Later this week, I dropped into the "newsagent" in the Sunshine Coast's largest shopping centre and found it had morphed into a gift shop. No local (News Corp) daily to sell any more - nor those of neighbouring towns - and the magazine section had been squashed into a corner. I eventually found an August edition of UK cruising mag Yachting Monthly - hidden under other titles - and learned that they weren't expecting any more recent issues anytime soon. Another sorry example of an industry shattered... and not entirely as a result of COVID-19. Sad.

Sections: Columns & opinion

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