A graphical breakdown of the death of newspapers | Hacker News Reader

A graphical breakdown of the death of newspapers

mint.com

The gray background is a little hard to read against. White would have been much better.

I don't know if I trust stock prices as a measure of the "death of the newspaper". I mean pretty much every company's stock prices went down recently.

I think it would, however, be interesting to see how the fall in stock prices for the newspaper companies compares with the fall in stock prices for other companies in different fields, say online news services or TV news.

compare with the dow:

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=^DJI#chart1:symbol=^dji;r...

I would really like to see some statistics about online press because it is not clear for me at the moment if people are moving online or just simply stopping to read. If it is the latter, we have a huge problem.

I've got this question after reading Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

Looking at the people around me my guess would be moving online at the expense of periodicals and TV.

That's a very limited sample though. I used to be an avid newspaper and periodicals reader, 3 subscriptions to monthlies (nature, Scientific American and the Lancet) and a newspaper were paid for, then reading every other publication I could get my hands on.

Now it's all internet.

My other friends and family are much the same. In a shopping center a while ago I was offered something like 6 months free on a newspaper subscription. I said no thanks and the person was like 'what do you want, what does it make to get you to accept' and I said I don't think it can be done.

Even if its free I still have to get rid of the things every couple of weeks, and they harm the environment. I do buy books on paper though, there's something about curling up in a corner with a book that a computer can't give me (yet).

I was talking more about general audience. I understand that people who read SciAm won't magically switch to the Twitter and YouTube videos as their main media for public discourse.

P.S. Not related to the main topic, but you might find it interesting. For the past few months I was reading books exclusively on Kindle but recently I had to buy a paper book (Coders At Work) and the experience is awful so far. I can't highlight and save quotes I like, I can't make notes, I can't quickly look up a word definition. But the worst part is that with Kindle I forgot how difficult and almost impossible it is to read while standing in the train or laying in bed. So, although Coders At Work is a very interesting book I can't wait to finish it and return to my ebook reader.

That's as good an ad for the kindle as I've seen to date :)

Not sure how well they work in Europe though, I'll have to look in to that.

AFAIK they are pretty much useless outside the United States. Check out other readers (from Sony, etc.). They are pretty much the same but not tied up to the Amazon.com.

Ok, I will do that. Thanks for the tip!

There were zero weekend newspapers in 1989? That first graph is pretty confusing.

No, there were 60-odd million. The graph does not seem hard to read to me at all. There is a darker color graph overlain by a partially transparent lighter color graph.

Its not that hard to read, but a simple line graph would probably have been clearer.

Newspapers have grown decreasingly diverse over time as they have concentrated more and more on regurgitating wire stories, with human interest non-news, opeds, and fill-in-the-blank local reportage as padding. Very little of the content in papers is legitimately new reporting or investigative journalism. As wire reports etc. have become available cheaper, faster, and more conveniently through the internet and TV the dubious nature of the "value add" of news papers has become more and more apparent.

That news papers have become utterly dependent on advertising in an age when print advertising is dying is a separate phenomenon which has effectively sealed the fate of most papers. Few papers are willing to accept the notion that they cannot survive without dramatic, fundamental changes. They would rather live with the fantasy that it's just not possible or that profitability is just a few little insubstantial tweaks away.

If papers dumped their standing armies of news regurgitators, got lean, and concentrated solely on local news and investigations, they might have a chance of surviving in the modern, ultra-connected world. But few are willing to make such dramatic changes, so we will see a lot of papers die before this all gets sorted out.

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