"How could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin?" Paul Gillin asks on his blog Newspaper Death Watch - which vies, perhaps hastily, for the death of the newspaper industry. According to him, in the post-Watergate era, US newspapers excessively focused on chasing Pulitzer prizes, thus diminishing their much-needed local coverage.

Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger's 2007 farewell piece puts the start of the decline in the post-Watergate period when journalists began to revel in excess, refusing to travel any other way beside first-class, and according to Gillin, "Steiger's piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises."

Eric Alterman's recent article in The New Yorker adds that papers lost their focus on local journalism and their readers during post-Watergate as well. Papers edged towards increased impartiality, and the scramble to win Pulitzers to duplicate the Washington Post's Watergate success cost newspapers millions of dollars on large Washington bureaus and overseas correspondents.

Another trend that began in the 1970's was the rise of the "insider journalist." In Gillin's view, reporters became celebrities with access to powerful people, who learned "to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well."

According to Gillin, newspapers didn't make any changes because they had healthy and predictable profit margins, and their investors were happy. However, most big companies, according to Gillin, "often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under."

Gillin's concludes that "it's too late for the newspaper industry to save itself."  He forsees massive consolidations, more layoffs and the emergence  a new form journalism which uses blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, and search engines.

But although the newspaper industry may have been slow to transition to embrace new media formats, it is actively doing so now, through blogs, social networks, multimedia projects and the inclusion of readers in the news process. Up to them to prove Gillin wrong.

Source: Newspaper Death Watch through Journerdism