Thanks for this, PW. Maybe we old-school types who have to have actual newsprint in our hand (I don’t mind looking up the URLs of articles for the benefit of FDLers, but that’s as far as I’ll go) had better move to Europe because our material is on the way out stateside.

I come from a newspaper background. Google has little to nothing to do with their demise. If you want to point fingers Craigslist and Monster and Ebay had more causality than Google.

Papers were folding and bleeding money long before google.

1) Most Swedes are educated and articulate. 2) Most Americans know sports and breakfast cereal jingles.

While newspapers in Sweden are satisfied with 10% profit, the finance-wizard types here often want 35%, and cut editorial and other staff members to achieve it. The huge amounts of money borrowed for mergers of newspapers has to be paid, and the banker bean squeezers force management to keep margins high, so they can extract even more profits for rich investors.

Unfortunately, inheritance taxes made many family newspapers sell in recent decades, simply because of the capital-intensive nature of printing plants – presses, etc. You can’t sell the equipment to pay the tax, or you would go out of business, and if you borrow you need a bank truly willing to lend to small businesses.

Many of the new execs at newspapers never ran a publication, can’t write, can’t sell ads, and wouldn’t know a press from an inserting machine. They destroy newspapers, as I’ve seen in nearly 50 years in the business. When they go bankrupt, the investment banks get paid first, and everyone else watches union agreements end, their pay cut, their assistant gone, the product turned into mostly fluff and amateur advertorials.

But remember, if we focus just on the revenue streams, all we are doing, in the most direct and immediate sense, is rooting for wealthy families and corporations to make yet more money. Of course, we have in mind an unstated premise that newspaper publishers will continue to support the journalistic and community functions that make newspapers socially important, and something we dread losing.

But in today’s U.S. corporate world, is that assumption still valid? It’s certainly true of the N.Y. Times company, for all its many, many, many (I could go on) faults. But how many other big owners just see their papers as other than past-their-prime revenue generators to be hollowed out to improve the bottom line? That shortsightedness, which means these companies won’t be making the creative investments needed to keep the newspapers relevant, is probably not actually good business in the long run, but this is corporate America we’re talking about, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Could be Europe as a whole has less of an idiot population weaned on American Idol shit type media than the U.S. That plus their business models seem to take more of a long-term approach rather than a casino mentality.
The American Empire is rotting from the core out.

Yes.

Do they have a Fairness Doctrine in Sweden? Do they have laws that restrict hate speech?

Since on another blog I have been considering the Constitutional separation between Church and State, it only seems natural to wish we had a Constitutional separation between Corporation and State and Fourth Estate – then perhaps our newspapers would be thriving also.

Newspapers were in trouble long before the internet, really — radio and then TV cut into what was once a pretty sweet news monopoly.

Moore makes a similar point.

It seems that Swedes like intelligent, thoughtful discourse in their papaers and not tons of adverts and fluff articles like Americans do.

There’s nothing you say I disagree with. But in this conversation, we shouldn’t automatically equate newspapers with some enlightened ideal.

Murdoch’s “News of the World” was no doubt a sleazy rag that eventually turned into a criminal enterprise. But it was also a real paper with reporters that found news and wrote stories that a lot of people wanted to read. If we support newspapers, then I think we need to accept that something like that had value, however distasteful a read it would have been to many of us.

While newspapers in Sweden are satisfied with 10% profit, the finance-wizard types here often want 35%, and cut editorial and other staff members to achieve it.

And as I believe Molly Ivins pointed out some years ago, oil companies in comparison have around a 20% margin yet nobody’s worried that they’re about to go under.

This sums up the story in a nutshell. We are fortunate in Montreal to have a truly first-class newspaper (La Press), which is owned by one of Canada’s wealthiest families and run as a real fourth estate operation. It makes money and it actually increased its circulation last year. It supports several foreign correspondentd and does serious investigative reporting. It’s English language counterpart is by contrast mediocre, gets most of its international reporting off the wire, and despite a few high spots does not do much in-depth investigative reporting. It has been bought and sold several times with the predictable consequences.

The newspapers in Sweden, as in much of Europe, are identifiably left- or right-leaning and tend to be identified with one or another political party. So there’s a bit of continuity between the journalistic and political spheres, which benefits both as well as representative democracy. Readers may feel a bit more urgency in knowing what a particular paper has to say on the news as a result.

Whereas the US newspapers claim to be neutral — or “fair and balanced” — yet are almost always biased towards serving the interests of the rich and powerful to the exclusion of all else.

Most of the comments have covered the territory about profit margins & how the newspaper industry has devolved in the USA over the past decades. Yes, a lot of other media cut into the profits of print news, but we are back into the territory of how much is “enough profit”?

Certainly the notions and ideas about profit – how much is enough? how much do you really really need to make to be considered “profitable”? – is a huge part of the equation. In our greedy times, the 1% and those in the upper eschelons of the 99% simply cannot get enough anymore. And so, the result is declining quality and quantity all around – and no better example exists but the state of newspapers across our land: ever slimmer, ever more filled with gargantuan ads, rather than news, commentaries and editiorials. And like US TV, ever more padded out with junk articles that aren’t even interesting.

Our wealthy “betters” would adjure us serfs that they caaaaan’t help it; pity them for all the horrid tax burdens they suffer… as they shuffle off to one or the other of their numerous mansions with multi-car garages filled with the top of the line expensive autos & trucks, whilst jetting around the planet in their private GulfStreams, etc, ad nauseum.

Frankly, the newspaper “barons” – such as they exist, mainly Rupert Murdoch – aren’t particularly interested in providing “news” to the masses, and why should they when a compliant citizenry is so easily satisfied with drek, bullshit & some sports.

It’s the American Way!!!

Swedes, clearly, have different standards, and I tip my hat to them for that.

Americans thrive on magical thinking. Thoughtful journalism doesn’t cut it.

For the oil cos, gov’t subsidies, tax loopholes, low cost land leases, and military assistance make up the difference. We sure wouldn’t want any such ties between the press and gov’t, except maybe for tax advantages based on filling a need that otherwise wouldn’t be served in some places (but even so…I’m not sure that would be good).

Maybe newspapers are dying because most of them aren’t very good. Ownership concentration, multiple rounds of budget cuts, the dilution of editorial talent and the philosophy that the main function of a newspaper is to maximize profitability for owners has created a vicious circle in which the product gets degraded to boost profits, readership declines, which necessitates further cuts. In a world in which people can access all the news they could possibly want on the Internet, mostly for free, newspapers haven’t figured out what niche they can fill by giving readers something they can’t get elsewhere. In fact for the most part they haven’t even asked the question – complacency in the face of technological obsolescence will be the industry’s death.

Having said all that when I’m dining alone I’m sure to take the Guardian Weekly. It’s a better dinner companion than a lot of people I know.

Our local newspapers’ financial health and relevance declined in direct proportion to the extent to which they were intertwined into national chains.

lol.. i could write a thesis on this….

I know Jane is always riding google, but in honesty the types of ads they deal with would likely not have advertised in a Major paper anyway and if they did it would have been some dinky ad.

And dont even get me started on newspaper ad sales people…..they do whats best for their commision structure regardless of the clients needs.

People seem to think that papers were some hallowed institution.

more often than not they simply run AP wire stories. when i was in radio we called that rip and read, where you rip the story off the teletype — lol…seems so quaint today that stories used to come that way – and read it with any further editing, writing or research.

Much like the entertainment industry, papers got caught up in outdated modes of distribution. Like they still try and sell DVDs. I dont think Ive even played a DVD since like 2005. The papers did too little, too late and the ground had changed under them and their business model was already a relic.

The bread and butter for any paper were the classifieds. Display brought in big bucks but Classifieds are what kept the lights on. Monster and all the jobsites took the biggest chunk. I remember at one point when I was looking for employement that I didnt even bother with the paper. If a company was only placing an ad in the paper then that told me they were stodgy and out of date and not somewhere I would want to work. Then Craigslist and Ebay and any number of niche sites took the rest.

US newspapers aren’t interested in their readership. When the Internet gave them the opportunity to build an interactive community with their readers, they passed and have kept on passing. They don’t even realize the opportunity, even today. Too bad.