Diverse experiments with generating sustainable print/digital business models are being conducted nationwide and in other developed nations. The Economist, makes the point that newsgathering and news dissemination are moving away from centralized control by massive entities and is returning to amorphous exchanges between individuals and among small groups. There are Facebook and Twitter and websites and email and electronic sources with private audiences and networks.

To continue
The company which publishes the Oakland Press (years ago the Pontiac Press), the Daily Tribune (to both of which I subscribe), and the Macomb Daily has been purchased by another company.* "My"  two papers are struggling: OakPress still publishes daily, but it's getting thin and understaffed and has reached out to free-lance bloggers to cover, especially, evening public meetings. The Trib is understaffed and has joined the Detroit News and  the Detroit Free Press in publishing 3 or 4 days a week, including Sunday. The Macomb Daily publishes daily.

All those newspapers also maintain some sort of online presence.

It is inevitable that the new owner will make changes of one sort or another: Go weekly, as did the Christian Science Monitor (CSM); Consolidate the OakPress and the Trib; Terminate one or both of them; Convert totally to online news delivery.  AOL is experimenting nationally with setting up local online daily "newspapers."  www.royaloak.patch is one local example. The world is watching to see whether AOL's business model proves sustainable.

My mention of CSM is more than a hint that our local problems reflect national, even worldwide, developments. The search for sustainable new business models -- for print or digital or combinations of both -- is being vigorously conducted. A sense of the scope of those developments comes through in the excerpts below from a 16-page special report, "The News Industry" in the July 9th 2011 issue of The Economist.

• American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead.

• The real trouble that a lot of US news organizations have is that they are defined by geography -- by how far trucks could go to deliver papers in the morning.

• Newspapers in western Europe [boldface, theirs] are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain.

• [Abroad] Most news outlets [print and television] are openly partisan. Thanks to India's vast population, there is scope for growth in print media for years to come.

• New business models are proliferating as news organizations search for novel sources of revenue.

• It is clear that revenue from online advertising alone will not be enough to cover the costs of running a traditional news organization.

• News providers throughout the rich world are starting to charge for content on the web and mobile devices. . . . Existing readers of newspapers and magazines are generally unwilling to pay for news online or on mobile devices if it costs them extra.

• Bundling digital access with print subscriptions . . . not only offers readers choice but also gives them and added reason to go on buying print editions, which still pull in the lion's share of advertising revenue.

*Alden Global Capital has purchased Journal Register Company.

02 Aug 2011
New York Times Reader Kills Dozens in Norway
That is the not quite tongue-in-cheek headline of a column by Ann Coulter. The headline and the following opening paragraphs make it clear what she thinks of the NYT.

The New York Times wasted no time in jumping to conclusions about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who staged two deadly attacks in Oslo last weekend, claiming in the first two paragraphs of one story that he was a "gun-loving," "right-wing," "fundamentalist Christian," opposed to "multiculturalism."

It may as well have thrown in "Fox News-watching" and "global warming skeptic."

This was a big departure from the Times' conclusion-resisting coverage of the Fort Hood shooting suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Despite reports that Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar!" as he gunned down his fellow soldiers at a military medical facility in 2009, only one of seven Times articles on Hasan so much as mentioned that he was a Muslim.

Of course, that story ran one year after Hasan's arrest, so by then, I suppose, the cat was out of the bag...

"Alden Global Capital has purchased Journal Register Company," Versagi Voice reported last week.

Journal Register is/was the owner of the Oakland Press and the Daily Tribune, both of which are struggling.

Alden Global's announcement stressed that the future of journalism is digital, not print, and I predicted that the new owner will be making changes.

Already, some features -- like opinion pages, TV listings, movies, business news -- have been moved online or seem to have been eliminated. Poor old Dear Abby has been banished to the Classified  Advertising pages. OakPress is asking readers to rate, 1-to-5, their interest in 16 topics -- everything from police news to TV listings, from professional sports to letters to the editor. The Trib seems to be experimenting with layout and content. Already its content, other than a handful of truly local stories, is from wire services and pickups of pages and sections from OakPress.

It was late in the Sixties when newspaper editors began seriously asking readers what they preferred to see in their papers. More traditional editors teased, "Every survey shows that the comic pages are our most popular feature. Let's put the leading cartoon strips on Page One, above the fold, and bury the serious news among the Classifieds."

Fast Forward: Today, 08 August 2011, my very thin Oakland Press has no editorial page and devotes a long column on Page One to anonymous Sound Off posts. This generation's comics?