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Is a newspaper a newspaper if there’s no paper involved?
The trend of newspapers giving up the ghost and ending or restricting their print versions has been going on for a few years now, with the latest example being the announcement that the venerable Newark Star Ledger, the paper known for influential coverage of New Jersey politics and for being the paper on Tony Soprano’s driveway every morning, will be ceasing its print editions soon and will be purely online at NJ.com, as will its sister papers in Trenton, Gloucester County, and Hunterdon County; the tabloid Jersey Journal will be collateral damage, with the closure of the Star Ledger’s printing plant causing the smaller paper to shut down for good.
The decision of the Newhouse/Advance Media chain to entirely shut down print editions of the paper follows a trend that the company itself kicked off. Want a local daily in Birmingham or Mobile? Yeah, sorry about that. There’s still news in Alabama, but the papers are now a website and the racks up front at the 7-Eleven are empty. Maybe they have USA Today, but it’s getting harder and harder to find actual print versions of local papers.
How much does that matter? Probably not much to a typical reader. Some of the papers have digital e-editions that look like the old print papers (and have horribly outdated news stories, just like the paper versions). Websites and social media offer a practically infinite news hole, as opposed to the limited number of pages the print editions could offer. And, well, when was the last time you picked up a print newspaper?
Where you can get one, they’ve gotten terribly thin, dated, and really expensive. Also pointless, because you’ve already read the articles if you’re online. Print papers are probably important only to the very elderly (I still see a handful of homes in my neighborhood with the Sun-Sentinel or Palm Beach Post wrapped in a plastic bag on the driveway) and the unions that printed and delivered them.
The newspaper industry has taken a lot of well-earned criticism for its failure to react to changing technology in time. Surely, the early resistance to paywalls cost them a lot of revenue. You can also criticize them for failing to extend their brands to digital, or to create new digital-only identities to build upon their histories. Pivoting to video also didn’t turn out so well, because video (and for many papers, audio) isn’t their core competence. Many of the problems faced by the not-really-newspapers-anymore industry were self-inflicted, and the continuing layoffs and shutdowns are the result. And don’t get me started on private equity.
But a lot of the problem is that there was little newspapers could do as the technology train thundered towards them and consumer preferences evolved. The internet brought with it a better way to disseminate news. People wanted their entertainment and information on demand and on their phones. Newspapers were slow to embrace the changes. And the same happened to radio, and broadcast TV, and music, and movies. Some could adapt. Many could not. And so, Tony Soprano, if he survived the hit at Holsten’s, won’t be finding the Star Ledger at the end of his driveway starting in February. He’ll have to rely on NJ.com instead.
What happened to the Star Ledger could happen to your company. The owners might wonder why they bother with FCC licenses and transmitters and towers when they could just stream content and sell off the real estate (or cancel some leases). Radio has already largely gone to voice tracking and syndication, and younger generations, if they choose to listen to radio, are streaming it anyway. Linear TV has been “the old people’s medium” for years. There are better ways to distribute your content.
Which is why it was so important a few years back to establish your brand as the go-to for news in your market. If you did that, people will seek you out online; despite the recent controversies and spate of subscriber defections, consumers still turn to the New York Times and Washington Post even if they don’t get it in print.
If your news product is good, and people identify your station or paper as the leading source of information, you can survive even without whatever medium was your origin. Will people miss the tactile pleasures of reading the print paper at the breakfast table? Sure. Would people miss your radio station if they could still get it with streaming? Maybe. But technology changed, times have changed, consumer preferences have changed.
So, you change, too.
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
