14/11/16 - Newspapers big and small are facing an existential crisis (20)

14/11/16 -  Newspapers big and small are facing an existential crisis (20)

'Advertising revenue, is in the process of being destroyed,' and because of it local newspapers in particular are having no choice but to shut down. Eskdale & Liddesdale Advertiser for example, a Cumbrian newspaper, is beginning to lose money and is now seeking a 'community benefactor' to prevent the it from being closed next month after 168 years of publication. However what's particularly noteworthy here is that even much larger publications such as the Wall Street Journal are even facing their own issues having to make workers take voluntary redundancies as well as just more simply, letting staff go. As said by Washington Post writer Pete Vernon and rightly so: 'Print advertising, still the most lucrative revenue source for most newspaper companies, is in a freefall. The cash cow has steadily declined for years, but 2016 has seen an acceleration in the departure of ad dollars.' But what's the reason for this? As we've become more accustomed to it, digital giants are cited as the reason this freefall is occuring, 'threatening journalism itself.'

• By 2 November, with 48 people having already accepted the deal, it emerged that the Journal’s section covering Greater New York was being folded into the paper’s broader coverage of the city. That threatened the jobs of a further 19 staff (Wall Street Journal)
• According to a recent analysis, for the Columbia Journalism Review by Washington Post writer Pete Vernon, national print advertising in the States has fallen by 35.1% over the year
• Between 2010 and 2015, there had been “a relatively stable decline” of print advertising (between 5-8% each year, according to the Pew Research Center)
• A predicted 11% fall in advertising this year “now seems optimistic.”

This article works to reiterate the sentiments and facts that there as to the decline of the newspaper industry. This year particularly has been catastrophic for it, with even major, more renowned papers becoming victims to it too. What will be interesting to see is the move the companies in the industry will take, as in whether they'll migrate to the e-media platform or simply just remain dead, as well as how digital giants like Google and Facebook will have to respond as they are the ones mainly being held accountable for it.