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I work for a newspaper and unfortunately it is all about "pageviews, pageviews, pageviews". In the 10 years I have been here (I'm 30 now) the newsroom has shrunk by 75%.

One of the first people to go was an opinion columnist whose phone always rang. He would take calls from supporters and not so supportive people. But the one thing that made him known, loved, hated...etc. was the fact that he was out there talking to the people.

Now what's left of the newsroom, +/- 10 people serving a community of 100,000+, are glued to their desk and dont leave the building unless its for a council meeting. A lot of them spend there day fluffing press releases and turning a quote into a full blown story.

I am in the minority in the building who believes having an informed public is important. Maybe I should start my own blog/news site for my city. Maybe I can convince some college kids to follow me and start rubbing elbows and pissing of politicians.

[ChuckMcM]

Yup. There are so many legacy things in the newspaper business that make running the business so difficult. When the San Jose Mercury News was dying in the Bay Area I emailed back and forth with Dan Gillmor[1] on his take on it. He is very passionate about being able to create new ways to inform and educate the public for the common good.

The NY Times has done several pieces on the cost structures that weigh on newspapers, in the early days of kindle the publisher suggested that they could give away kindles to their subscriber base, and free up all the resources of printing, storing, distributing, and managing the actual paper business and be profitable, except that their customer base was firmly wedded to the "paper experience" of picking up the paper and reading it widely on the coffee table with a bagel.

So if we assume that people develop their habits in their 20's, ingrain them in their 30's and 40's, and complain about the way things were in their 50's, that is 25 - 30 years to clear the decks of a previous way of doing things and replace it with a new way. We are about half-way through that transition with Newspapers. Sources of news for people in their 20's is the web (and often their phone as reader), and for people in their mid to late 40s and early 50's still paper newspapers. In 2025 there won't be enough people who cares about getting their newspaper on print to allow printing them to continue, and so these new news agencies will be all digital. And with communications being fast enough there won't be any need to have an office for everyone to meet in. The equivalent of large scale Google Hangouts will suffice. And since random advertising will be completely discredited by then the only place people will advertise seriously will be with digital properties that charge a subscription service (that makes Ad fraud much disproportionately more expensive for the fraudsters) And once again subscriber base, not page views or clicks will become a major influence on ad revenue. That will lead to a great renaissance of good journalism which will be paid for by the ability of the editor/publisher to make enough money to pay their staff.

Between here and there though, are the slowly rotting corpses of organizations like the Sun-Times.

[1] https://dangillmor.com/

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I have repeated some of the things here to my coworkers in the past. My city for the most part is a community of retired people (baby boomers). They are use to getting their paper, and get angry when the crosswords are missing. You'd be surprised how many elderly people call and complain about little things like that, or maybe it's not so surprising.

Social media has changed the way news is reported as well. Everyone is a reporter now and by the time news agencies find out about an incident the public knows more about it then they do.

If someone is around when an accident happens they snap a picture and post it on facebook before offering the injured a helping hand. By the time a reporter catches the beat the comments are full of more information than the reporter could gather on their own. "Oh that's so and so....etc."

If you went to our website and removed all the click bait, advertising, "non-news" items the page would: 1: load faster :) 2: be mostly empty

Sad times for newspapers.