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Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation over past 2 decades

theawl.com — The L.A. Times is hurtin'

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 27, 2009

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  • jmdwinter, on 10/27/2009, -4/+114Screw newspapers! I prefer my news to be about the top 10 videogame characters with constipated facial expressions... stuff that's important!
  • decoy26517, on 10/27/2009, -4/+58Looks like the Wall Street Journal was doing something right.
  • kcdstudios, on 10/27/2009, -0/+51Oh god.

    "Two decades" ago is now 1990, not 1980s-ish.

    I'm getting so old.
  • rmxz, on 10/27/2009, -3/+39I don't see why people think this is a bad thing.

    Did people mourn when the last black-and-white TV station switched to color?

    I think it's nothing but positive for them to stop killing trees and publishing on other media instead.

    (or are people sad because they're thinking that burying all these newspapers in landfills counts as helping remove CO2 from the atmosphere - it does seem awfully similar to some of the carbon sequestration strategies environmentalists propose these days)
  • diggbigwig, on 10/27/2009, -1/+36As long as they pay their bills, I'm guessing they don't care if you wipe your ass with it.
  • Spandia, on 10/27/2009, -0/+31I'm not sure printing means what you think it means.
  • krisjanis, on 10/27/2009, -0/+27thats one tall graph
  • shroommi, on 10/27/2009, -0/+25The difference between black and white television switching to color and newspapers switching to the internet IS a bit different. Why? Because color television made money. Internet newspapers tend to be free or cheap, and are leading to a decline in the number of journalists and therefore the quality of the news.

    And I think that that is a problem.
  • GodAImighty, on 10/27/2009, -2/+25The Daily News and NY Post are ***** newpapers anyway and NYC would be better off without em.
  • codyman, on 10/27/2009, -5/+23Why is everyone so butt hurt about losing an ancient, slow medium of communication that has been outdated for numerous years... are people still pissed that you can't send a telegram anymore either?
  • TheUngod, on 10/27/2009, -6/+23Yeah, selling 1000 copies to businesses that get thrown away without being read. Theres always huge stacks in the lobby of my office.
  • michaelpinto, on 10/27/2009, -0/+15Ouch! I can see NYC being a one paper town in less than five years - the Daily News and NY Post are doomed as they don't have a national audience.
  • tscbill5, on 10/27/2009, -3/+17Newspaper makes the trash burn which plays an integral role in the creation of stars.
  • iconmaster, on 10/27/2009, -1/+15The graph explicitly states that WSJ's numbers include online subscribers.
  • BryanRoush, on 10/27/2009, -2/+12Looks like there is something to be learned from the WSJ...
  • jsp123, on 10/27/2009, -0/+9What?
  • CocodaMonkey, on 10/27/2009, -0/+8That's crazy talk, of course you can still send a telegram.

    http://www.sendtelegram.com/
  • victorycig, on 10/27/2009, -0/+8Before folks start digging you down for criticizing big media's focus on profits, gsm, I want to point out that the newspaper industry had traditionally been family owned in the US and was understood as an important social institution in spite of the fact that it usually did NOT produce much profit.

    During consolidation in the 80s, 90s and 00's, mega corporations that bought newspaper properties crusaded against "wasteful spending" and insisted upon increasing returns to the detriment of their news production. Simply stated, they put profits ahead of quality.
  • TomT127, on 10/27/2009, -1/+9Like most Digg users, I get all my news from the Daily Show.
  • lindenwold, on 10/27/2009, -1/+8expect the NY Post to stay down there as long as they keep turning out crap like this:

    http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/the_frillies_ar ...

    This article honestly reads like it was written by a retarded gang-banger.
  • victorycig, on 10/27/2009, -1/+8*****, NYC is going to be a no paper town soon. The decline of quality journalism is really worrisome. And as much as I like some participatory media like Digg, and some citizen journalism, they won't fill the vacuum.

    Instead, it will likely be online metro news publications like Chitown News, Voice of San Diego and (shameless plug) Open Media Boston that conduct investigative journalism and find the new business models that work with online distribution and expectations of the free culture movement.
  • sugarazor, on 10/27/2009, -0/+7"There will always be a demand for good journalism"

    And that's why no one watches Fox News, right?!
  • robertisaar, on 10/27/2009, -0/+7telegram? what's that? i better send a question to my family through a smoke signal and find out. it sounds like technoligical trickery.
  • L0NER, on 10/27/2009, -1/+7Yet they still pay a lot of the reporters that generate real news.
  • EddiePotato, on 10/27/2009, -0/+6This is the 15th century?
  • rburton, on 10/27/2009, -1/+6Because Fox News, in no way, shows political bias. /s
  • lindenwold, on 10/27/2009, -2/+7they became a tabloid.
  • xceptionaly, on 10/27/2009, -1/+6Because one of them is a tone-neutral fact-checked article written by a credible journalist, and the other is Huffington Post AOL-speak blogspam trying to find a way to give Obama another e-rimjob regardless of what the article is related to.
  • Subcrtical, on 10/27/2009, -0/+5I work in the LA Times building- Let's just say there's a lot of empty office space...
  • BridgeBurner, on 10/27/2009, -0/+5Adapt or die...pretty simple.
  • ProjectGSX, on 10/27/2009, -5/+9Objectivity faaaaaaaail.
  • jhandfield, on 10/27/2009, -0/+4It's not all that surprising to me, look at Digg. People scream "tl;dr" at the top of their lungs when someone links an article that takes more than 2 minutes to read, I can't say I would expect these same people to sit down and read something that's dozens of printed pages of small text.

    That and the political left-vs-right mindset has so thoroughly claimed printed media much like everything else to the point where you've got an entire portion of the population who can't be seen reading a particular paper because it's been labeled as belonging to the 'wrong side.'
  • AaronPDX, on 10/27/2009, -0/+4And they say they're having a hard time maintaining their business model. Come on. Clearly there's a working version already out there.
  • EddiePotato, on 10/27/2009, -1/+5i.e.crappy. Kind of ironic that a graph indicating the superiority of online media is formatted so poorly for online viewing.
  • nextekcarl, on 10/27/2009, -0/+4I hear you. Thinking about the remake of V and seeing it as a kid, and then figuring out how long ago that was made me actually think about how old I'm getting. Damn.
  • gsm54321, on 10/27/2009, -0/+3Exactly, I work with a weekly in my town that seriously puts the other dailies to shame. The dailies get half their copy off the wire, the other half is PR plugs. I think they are too busy trying to get adds and golfing with the mayor to actually care. The sad irony in life is that if all you care about is the profit margin, it's often the first thing to go.

    I think it's important to note the the papers hit their inflection point BEFORE the internet. Mother Jones did a good write up a while back that showed the correlation in the decline of paper circulation ties in better with the push for corporate ownership in the '90s then with the rise of the internet. Though the web hasn't helped.
  • FormerBabby, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4The internet has news! Why pay for a paper when its already on your computer?
  • jdames1980, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4Nice cliff.
  • jorgio, on 10/28/2009, -0/+3guess you dont read it much
  • Joshislong, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4That doesn't sound right, but I don't know enough about it to say you're wrong.
  • BotaXero, on 10/27/2009, -0/+3It's scary outside.
  • sgerwel1985, on 10/27/2009, -0/+3Goodbye printed news, you were a true friend through many *****.
  • EddiePotato, on 10/27/2009, -0/+3It's not a problem the market can't solve. There will always be a demand for good journalism, and as it starts becoming seriously scarce, more people will be willing to pony up and pay for it online. We're not going to wake up one day to a world where there are no good journalists or good news sources left, unless nobody is demanding such.
  • digitalArtform, on 10/27/2009, -0/+3Bible is consistently the number 1 world best seller.

    As far as WSJ goes...

    People have been becoming increasing desperate since Reaganomics kicked in. Everyone wants some magic WSJ beans hoping to turn their finances around. When everyone is drowning, the thing posing as a life preserver will sell well.
  • yacks, on 10/27/2009, -3/+6and they also cheated by including paid online subscriptions
  • merku, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4I googled it also, and all it said, was to google it.
  • PhilMoskowitz, on 10/27/2009, -1/+4Keep pumping out those buggy whips.
  • jorgio, on 10/27/2009, -3/+6I wish the journal had a bigger sports section.
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