Julep Street by Craig Lancaster

Author:Craig Lancaster [Lancaster, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: MissouriBreaksPress
Published: 2017-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

From the Louisville Times, Sunday, April 22, 2012:

The abrupt closure last week of a well-regarded western Kentucky newspaper seemed to catch readers and advertisers by surprise, but veteran industry watchers say such a move has been coming for a long time, driven by an aging readership, a collapse in all-important classified advertising and a technological environment bending toward digital news delivery.

“I guess the shock, in this case, was that it came in an isolated market, at a smaller newspaper, and those have generally performed better than their larger metropolitan counterparts,” said David Trucks, who covers the industry for The New York Times. “But in a vacuum, the idea of a newspaper closing its doors isn’t shocking at all. Indeed, I’d say that we should prepare ourselves to hear this story much more often.”

Newspaper companies have long hoped that the ascendency of online news delivery, and the dollars associated with it, would eventually replace the revenue generated by the print product, and that, combined with the savings associated with the elimination of printing presses and costly home delivery, would eventually make online newsgathering viable financially. That turned out to not be the case at the Argus-Dispatch, and it’s not happening in many other places, either, Trucks said.

“A lot of these companies are in a real bind,” he said. “In many cases, they have massive debt to service, so they need not just a healthy margin, but a lot of money—and print still pays the biggest share of the freight. They’re finding it difficult to move toward online and maintain the newsroom staffing necessary to cover their communities. This is a customer service issue and, I’d argue, a democracy issue. Who’s going to mind the public till if newspapers go away? A good newspaper isn’t just the source of basic, commodity news. It binds a community together and keeps it civilized.”

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