This town ain't big enough for... either of us?

Posted by Helena Deards on March 12, 2009 at 4:35 PM

With the closure of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver became a one-newspaper town, and with the expected imminent demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle will be in the same situation. In the New York Times, Richard Pèrez-Peña explains that it may not stop here, and speculates over the most likely candidates to become the first zero-newspaper town in the States. Pèrez-Peña quotes Mike Simonton, a senior director at market analysts Fitch Ratings, who predicts, "In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets".

It is possible to make a distinction between recent newspaper closures, and those that came before, Pèrez-Peña points out. For the most part, earlier closures and problems were due to the financial problems of debt-laden owners, yet more recently there has been an "ominous trend" of publications owned by solvent companies closing and being threatened by closure. In a bid to cut costs, newspapers have been laying off staff, dropping editions, cutting pages and sharing content with former rivals. Despite declining print readership, online readership has in fact grown, but "no one yet has unlocked the puzzle of supporting a large newsroom purely on digital revenue".

The article also links to an interesting inforgraphic, giving an oversight of US newspapers and containing data on circulation - as well as pointing out which newspapers have already closed and those most likely to follow. Also given is a brief summary of the fortunes of the largest public news newspaper companies under the heading "The Most to Lose".

The vast majority of people both inside and outside the industry believe that one-newspaper towns would be a tragedy. Joel Kramer, who founded the online-only MinnPost.com explains "It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that's who does the bulk of the serious reporting." Even Kramer, whose own online publication competes with the local dailies, admits that such an event would cause an influx of small online news sites which can "can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can't replace them".

Source: New York Times