Having digested the remains of the Seattle P-I’s print audience, the Seattle Times is bleeding readership again, its paid circulation dropping 4.51 percent over the previous six month period, pretty much in line with the industry average. If worse for the industry is the decline in advertising revenue, down another 8.7 percent to $16.3 billion… less than half the industry total only two years ago.
Personally, I have serious doubts as to whether print remains a viable medium for delivering daily news in all but the largest markets. But I guess time will tell.
Print newspapers won’t really die for a long time–every area needs a paper of record.
That said, their editorials should be costing them readership.
@ 1
Their reporting cost them my readership.
I don’t get the Times because it’s not relevant to me. It’s editorials are too biased to toward conservatives. It doesn’t report enough on the state of working families and the middle class and it’s aggressively anti union.
I find the Weekly and the Stranger to have more investigative journalism and more accurate reporting and more editorial positions aligned with my values.
News won’t go away. $150 million printing presses will.
Why spend thousands of dollars printing a new paper every day when a couple of clicks and I can read the same article online?
Why read the seattle times when half their articles are directly off the reuters/AP feeds?
The only thing big media has going for it is that it can afford in depth, investigative reporting, and the seattle times never does that.
@2 Ditto.
Golly gee. I sure our trolls don’t want to see their tax dollars being wasted by supporting a failing business. Why, that smacks of liberalism.
I’ll ONLY buy one ’cause I guy I went to HS with works there.
Lots of other good, brave union folk work there as well.
Well, at least Dominic Gates poked his finger in the eye of Boeing management again.
Not that it really involved a lot of investigative reporting, the Seattle Time’s lead story on Sunday’s edition mostly repeated facts which have already been widely reported, save one: that’s the first time I’ve heard that the FAA might not grant ETOPS waivers for the 787 as part of it’s initial certification process. That could be a HUGE problem for Boeing, it sold that airplane as a long-distance carrier, and if it can’t fly more than sixty minutes from an airport lots of international carriers will be cancelling in droves. The next delivery schedule delay would give the best opportunity to do so without penalty.
But all things being said, I’m like the local sports fan who hates the current management of the team but still hopes for them to win the championship. The 787 will be a great plane, once they get the bugs worked out and the airplane finally delivered in spite of everything Boeign executives have done to ensure that doesn’t happen.
But the Seattle Times’ future has it’s limits. It’s only product is news, of course, and a printed daily newspaper is only one way to distribute that product, and a particularly expensive one at that. Even web sites/blogs may be dated as more people by-pass the computer entirely and get their news and entertainment on their wireless telephones.
I still like having an actual newspaper with me in the mornings while on the crapper. I’m fairly new to the area, so getting the “paper of record” is still important to me. I can see the editorial slant to the right on the choice of stories they publish, but I never read editorials any more. So much of the “news” today comes convieniently packaged with it’s own editorial bias already. Interesting that a rag that seems to be known as right wing carries Amy Goodman. It is also difficult to find news on AfPak that is deeper than body counts and anniversaries. The Times gives a couple of whole pages a week on the news minutia I find important on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Another report out today shows that online advertising budgets have, for the first time, surpassed print advertising. I find that a bit odd though. I never click on any online adverts, ignoring them entirely as a nuisance that my eye can quickly disregard for the important material. Print ads are different, in that, one must turn the page to ignore them. What will happen to all of the great magazines in the future if they too succumb to lack of advertising?
4. Roger Rabbit spews:
That’s the truth Rog.
@12 The on-line ads are quite clever in how they target us. I mentioned the JMI NGT 12.5″ telescope to Liberal Scientist in a thread the other day and it immediately started showing up in ads here at HA.
I wondered if those ads were just on my screen or on everybody’s.
12: “…I never click on any online adverts, ignoring them entirely as a nuisance that my eye can quickly disregard for the important material….”
I think we have also trained our eyes to ignore most print ads, as well. Print advertising has been overpriced for decades based on the premise that if people buy the newspaper/magazine, they will “see” the ad, and be affected by it. But our eyes are easily trained to skip over anything which doesn’t immediately interest us.
But at least with internet advertising, an advertisor knows he’s made an impact of some sort if someone clicks for more information.
What Goldy isn’t telling you …
The Seattle Times is doing better than most other newspapers. Nationally, US papers are down 5%. The Seattle Times is down less than that.
Do your homework, sheep.
http://articles.latimes.com/20.....n-20101025
Lunar Eclipse tonite begins at 10:15PST
It’s a clear, beautiful evening here.
No clouds to the West so………..good opportunity
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech.....day-night/
who needs the seattle times when you have julian asange?
@1 paper records are a thing of the past. i’m thinking about investing in the stone record. i hear stone carving is the next big thing.
@4. I’m with Mr.Cynical on this one. You got it right, Roger.
@17 dude thats beside the point.
@12 I think its interesting how, even after Google and Facebook, we still think of advertisements in the same way.
I am not a Seattle Times subscriber, yet they have started to litter my yard with a plastic wrapped role of their advertisements every couple of weeks. Presumably to keep their “circulation” numbers up. What asses. I guess this is the new unwanted phonebook.
to all the narrow minded lemmings who stated they stopped reading the times because they disagree with the editorial page: Ask yourself, what kind of person only reads editorials that agree with thier point of view?
Fuck, talk about a need for self-affirmation.
just further proof that progressives are the most close minded group in America.
damned pathetic.
18. Mr. Cynical spews: Lunar Eclipse tonite.
Cool. Thanks!
21. Dr. Zaius spews:
Ask yourself, what kind of person only reads editorials that agree with their point of view?
I can see your point.
But I’m voting with my wallet. They are not providing a product worth MY money, you are free to spend your money on it. Capitalism at work.
Opinions are like assholes, and for some reason ST collected columnists 5 years ago, and are paying them to look around their desks and write a column twice a week. Could half of those columnists write the same thing and self-support on a stand alone blog?
No.
People buy newspapers for news reporting, cut the columnists in half, save the ink.
SJ News April 1, 2011
Merger afoot. In a major piece of news, Weyerhauser has purchased the Blethen publishing company.
Linda Blethen, the current CEO of the Paper Disposables Division, will be the head of a new divisions to be called News-on-Paper Enterprises.
NOPE’s major product, the result of a totally secret project at Weyerhauser Research Labs in Tukwilla and Cambridge, Mass. will use disposable e-ink to print the days news on fresh sheets of highly cushioned toilet paper. The product, to be called NOPE Paper will have as its motto, “read before you need.”
Ms Blethen said, “by bringing the internet to the water closet, we are leveraging two of the greatest strengths of the 21st century.
Famed political columnist fro the Stranger, David Goldstein, has endorsed the NOPE product and was seen discarding his iPADs for a role of NOPE.
The Seattle Times recently dropped columnist Charles Krauthammer, which was a big disappointment to me. Krauthammer is simply a giant as far as columnists go: brilliant, knowledgeable and erudite, strategic, with a good writing style.
Fortunately, one can still find him at washingtonpost.com.
I’m always tempted to cancel my subscription when the editorial board of the paper makes a decision that I regard as ill-considered. Even after two big cocktails, I always choose to keep my subscription because the paper contains a ton of valuable news and information that isn’t available online.
Krauthammer is to smart as pork is to kosher,
both taste good and both are trafe.
Yet, you have to comment nearly every day on something in The Times. Nobody else gives a crap what is in there, why should you waste so much time commenting?
re 17: Good point about ignoring computer advertising.
But have you ever noticed how interested you get in, say, auto sales commercia;s when you are in the market for a car? Or how interesting an Empire ad seems when you are loking for carpet?
I wouldn’t line my bird cage with it…
@21:
I suppose I should have said their editorials should be costing them paying customers–I still read their nigh-on-worthless editorials most of the time, but do so for free online.
I’m happy to read opinions I disagree with. It’s part of why I’m a lawyer. That doesn’t mean I am willing to pay someone to make those arguments, particularly when they do so badly. I don’t just think that the editorials are wrong most of the time–I think they’re poorly written and reflect ignorance, or at the very least lack of serious thought most of the time. I’ll read every opinion Scalia writes, because while I disagree with him on nearly everything, the man’s a brilliant jurist. I won’t pay for the ST editorials because they’re not very good. Competence should trump ideology.
Roger Rabbit @ 4
The question is what will news look like in 10, 20, 30 years?
My favorite media guru, Clay Shirky, riffs on this point. We’re in a transitional period, similar to the time post Guttenberg (scribes -> movable type).
Clay argues that our notion of objective journalism is a quirk. News (reporting) costs real money. Requiring monopolies with fat margins (e.g. regional news papers). The internet finished what TV started in destroying that monopoly.
So who’s going to pay for investigative journalism?
Big money people, like Steve Job and Eric Schmidt, have claimed their trying figure out how to save the news. That’d be nice.
I contribute money, public television style, to a few outlets. But that’s just a drop.
One prediction I have is the wider adoption of the not-for-profit news room. Kind of like an NGO with an endowment. They’ll have to deep pockets to employ career journalists.
Another prediction, not original, is the attempt to censor Wikileaks (et al) will radicalize the population and give rise to more citizen journalism. Pretty much what I was doing on the election integrity issue, but with much better tools and support.
The two things I like about The Seattle Times, or any newspaper, are the reporting and comics.
The columnists are typically insane neocons (Friedman, Brooks, Krauthammer, Kristol 1 and 2, George Will), so I skip that section.
The editorials in the paper’s of record are, well, just flat. Tired. Predictable and obvious. Self serving.
It’s not just that I disagree with them. Rather, it’s the same Chicago School of Economics shock capitalism Cato Institute authored blather that I’ve seen for the last 30 years.
So I guess my chief complaints are
#1 Lack of diversity of opinion (accounting for Krugman, Eleanor Clift, Mark Shields and some other notable exceptions).
#2 The trogs haven’t said anything new in the last 30 years.
I used to believe that survival of print journalism was extremely important for our Country and democracy. The Seattle Times has convinced me that I was wrong.