Tracing The Decline Of Print Media

12 Responses to “Tracing The Decline Of Print Media”

1. GoldnI writes
   July 17th, 2009 12:16 pm

   Hey now, Ms. Cheap provides probably the most useful information in that paper!

2. Donna Locke writes
   July 17th, 2009 12:39 pm

   Ms. Cheap is “balanced” by that woman using the paper to sell $300 flip-flops.

   It really is kind of an embarrassment to have that paper in one’s driveway. I read it mainly for the health news now. I already know the other stuff before the paper hits the driveway. And the LTEs! — used to be the first thing I checked out; now I skip those lame things altogether.

3. Rachel writes
   July 17th, 2009 12:43 pm

   Donna, as a medical librarian, I’d be happy to suggest any number of other (online) sources for health news if you’d like.

4. dontcallmemikey writes
   July 17th, 2009 12:48 pm

   The whole chain newspaper concept killed print media - Gannett … bhah!

5. Donna Locke writes
   July 17th, 2009 12:50 pm

   Rachel, you do a great job of staying on top of some of that news. Yeah, I do read other sources. Have a couple of children in the family with some medical issues, and I don’t want to miss anything on those fronts.

   Please send me the links: tncoalition at hotmail dot com. Thanks.

6. Kay Brooks writes
   July 17th, 2009 1:31 pm

   And I’ll remind folks she used to work for the Nashville Banner (that was a more conservative evening paper in town for those of you who don’t know.) A big part of the reason the Banner doesn’t exist anymore is that the Tennessean owned the presses that printed the Banner.

7. Tom Paine writes
   July 17th, 2009 3:40 pm

   Well, that and the fact that nobody subscribed to it…

8. Tom Wood writes
   July 17th, 2009 5:50 pm

   “Snagged one Pulitzer after another” is a stretch. Best I can recall, the only Pulitzer The Tennessean ever won was Nat Caldwell’s in early ’60s.

   That said, it was a mighty fine paper in most respects (apart from biz coverage) through the ’60s and ’70s until Gannett got hold of it in ‘79 or ‘80. When I researched Al Gore’s time there for an article years ago, I ended up constantly wandering off to read other stories on the microfilm.

   One that sticks in my mind was an undercover investigation in which Frank Sutherland passed himself off as a mental patient to spend time in the old Central State Hospital. The resulting series exposed rampant maltreatment of the people confined in that institution. It led to real change, as best I can tell.

9. Orbserver writes
   July 18th, 2009 8:02 am

   Actually, The Nashville Tennessean won TWO Pulitzer Prize awards.

   From http://www.pulitzer.org:

   Winners and Finalists: 1962: National Reporting (Winner)
   Nathan G. Caldwell and Gene S. Graham / Nashville Tennessean
   For their exclusive disclosure and six years of detailed reporting, under great difficulties, of the undercover cooperation between management interests in the coal industry and the United Mine Workers.

   Winners and Finalists: 1957: Editorial Cartooning (Winner)
   Tom Little / The Nashville Tennessean
   For “Wonder Why My Parents Didn’t Give Me Salk Shots?” Published on January 12, 1956.

   The Tennessean was also recognized as a national Pulitzer Finalist on three occasions:

   Winners and Finalists: 1990: Public Service (Finalist)
   The Tennessean, Nashville, TN
   For an extended investigation by Phil Williams and Jim O’Hara of corruption in the state’s charity bingo industry, which prompted the indictment of dozens of individuals and legislative restrictions on bingo operations

   Winners and Finalists: 1986: Investigative Reporting (Finalist)
   Joel Kaplan and James Pratt / The Tennessean, Nashville, TN
   For their investigation of Congressman Bill Boner’s financial dealings, which revealed flagrant abuses and caused the U.S. Justice Department to re-open an investigation of the matter.

   Winners and Finalists: 1981: Public Service (Finalist)
   The Nashville Tennessean
   For its reporting on the national resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

10. Mark Rogers writes
    July 18th, 2009 6:10 pm

    Mikey,

    Gannett has been no friend of quality in newspapers but a lack of quality was never a consistently fatal flaw in papers. Consider the Hearst papers up through the 30s. Or the New York tabloids.

    The death knell for papers has been the rise in alternative media. The rise of TV news hurt dailies by offering faster coverage of some stories and the impact of video. TV also siphoned off advertising dollars that had once been the province of newspapers.

    The arrival of neo-new media like the internet offered greater immediate content and the option of coverage that seemed less biased to some consumers.

    Newspapers that manage to maintain high quality standards should be able to survive by developing alt media outlets and other innovations. Those papers that hold to their traditions of trying to play politics locally and use their news coverage to advance a partisan agenda by manipulating their news coverage will mostly die.

    In that vein, the Tennessean’s decline as a trusted source in our community began with the series on Congressman Boner in 1986. The information that the Tennessean collected could have been uncovered much earlier but the paper only chose to investigate Boner when it became clear he was looking at the job of Mayor and the Tennessean had its own candidate.

    I remember the shock of some Democrats that the Tennessean was actually attacking another Democrat, particularly a popular one like Boner. That moment, when the Tennessean’s use of its power for inter-party purposes, cost the paper its image of fairness with Democrats as well as Republicans.

    While I think that the paper has imporved in some ways recently, absent an investment in more serious news on Nashville issues and an end to its historically biased coverage of politics, the paper will continue to decline as a source of news.

11. dontcallmemikey writes
    July 18th, 2009 6:31 pm

    Not being in Nashville, I will accept your timeline - BUT, the nationalization of local newspapers has had a major impact in the decline of journalism. The new media has helped, but only because every paper from Johnson City to Memphis and all across the country has been *competing* with the same stories available 24-7 on TV and the internet and on radio stations (who’ve cut on-air staff and gone to national news instead of local- admittedly, radio has even bigger problems) and talk radio, which chews over the big stories over and over and over …
    Newspapers should, by their nature, be local. But in the wake of Gannett’s USA Today, local papers felt the need to compete editorially, forgetting their readership wanted to know who robbed who, who shot who, who’s getting married and who’s going broke a heck of a lot more than they wanted to know what President X said …
    All newspapers used to be partisan - so that was never an issue. And newspapers choosing candidates is also not new - an LA columnist was kingmaker in California for decades (Republican, Kyle Palmer, I believe was his name). But the coverage became less local, more national - and as ad revenue fell and smaller, niche papers made inroads (specializing in society news, entertainment news, etc. that wasn’t being covered by the big dog in town) for the ad dollars running away from the dailies in droves. More bang for the buck - a free entertainment paper can charge less for an ad, without the complications of consecutive day runs, etc. and contracts required in the dailies.
    If newspapers hope to succeed, they’ll figure out a way to go back to 75-25 or so local v. national, and suck up to being reflective of their communities … and I don’t know if the chains, like Gannett, will ever want to go back to that model.
    Means, of course, that the time is ripe for a local paper with bucks behind it to sneak in and steal the bigger boys thunder - BUT, I don’t think anyone with money is willing to go that route - the cost is large, the gain is slow …

12. Donna Locke writes
    July 18th, 2009 10:09 pm

    Out-of-state corporate ownership, slant to the degree that city “reporters” who don’t live in the county, much less the city, are allowed to write opinion columns about stories they have mostly not reported — editorializations that reflect the glaring ignorance and absence of curiosity of the writer and feature attacks on local officials the “reporter” has written about and quoted — all of this and more is killing small-town newspapers, also.

    My formerly locally-owned local paper, The (Columbia) Daily Herald, is guilty of the above and functions as an instrument to the political, county-remaking agenda of a publisher and an editor moved here by a media corporation based in Nevada. How bad is it? Well, I’ll tell you, Ed. Bad to the point that political reporting and political ad placement in the paper kiss the aforementioned agenda.

    This newspaper has won press association awards for “excellence,” clearly blind self-congratulatories indicative of the standards of the industry these days.