The decline continues

Loafing Oaf wrote: »

Anyway, the pertinent question for this thread is not why so many 'special advisor' are offered to former journalists but why so many journalists, even those in prominent roles, have been rushing to take up such positions in recent years. As Burns implies, it does seem to reflect a pervasive loss of confidence in the future of the profession...

Well in that regard can you blame them? They know the end is nigh. ABC circ details are thin on the ground these days but basically all papers are down to less than half their all-time highs and many are pushing 75%+. Even the annual rate of decline was increasing into the double digits. And that was pre-covid.

Print is finished by 2025 for literally every paper in Ireland. Local and national. The math just doesn't add up. There's still more consolidation and cuts and bits and pieces they can do to keep above water but they're walking dead and that's why the rats are fleeing the ship. Most can't sustain any transition to digital-only either. I expect only one or two will bridge that gap and even then they'll be a shadow of their former selves.

This is a good thing. It needs to happen. These rags are utterly toxic now and there's not one single paper that is an exception to that. They all need to and will disappear and the "democracy" they so cherish will actually be the healthier for it.

L1011 wrote: »

Weekday papers will go a long time before weekend editions and weekly locals, I'd expect. Weekly local content does not actually exist anywhere else.

It does: Facebook.

Local paper circulation declines are in many cases worse than nationals and that's because local papers actually masqueraded for decades as vital, but in reality they're not and never were.

Anything major that happened would be covered by national news (either RTE or any national weekday paper) and the rest was stuff that nobody but the people involved ultimately care about (local sports reporting, etc). It was mostly a social thing that got people to buy the paper. Your kid winning some school award and getting their pic in the paper, some couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and people at it being photographed. This kind of stuff all got usurped by facebook years ago. And people 50+ are all still on facebook and they are the demographic that were propping up local paper sales.

When you actually go through a local paper and you strip out all the ads, tv listings, sport, horoscopes, or utterly trivial local things that nobody actually cares about (as evidenced by them not buying the paper anymore) - there's nothing much left. It was never essential. It was just people buying it to see if anybody they knew was in it that week. Local voyeurism.

But then Facebook became the new way to indulge in that, and far more effectively too. Any local news was either trivial and boring, or big and thus covered more effectively by bigger national media.

And the typical standard of writing and editing - shocking! Grammar mistakes and misspellings left and right. Clunky and disjointed. Awful stuff.

One other reason for local news decline is the homogenisation of local areas across the country. Any distinct regional identity was far more common even just 10 years ago. But more and more, towns and villages are becoming less distinct and starting to resemble one another. Thank multiculturalism, globalism, increased transience and a general decline in social cohesion where people are, bit by bit, identifying less with their local town as a part of their identity. Obviously this process is only in its early stages still so it's not a massive factor, but it is a factor nonetheless imo.

Local papers are all owned by 2 or 3 big companies too. Working off the same boring templates. They're not "local" anymore, at least not like they might once have been. And they all can't resist pushing the liberal progressive angle too. I see it in my own home town. Two papers owned by INM and Iconic (I think). So they take their marching orders from them editorially just like they all do. The opinion pieces are always the same predictable snark and signalling. I'm sure plenty lap it up, but I'm sure many also get turned off and quit buying it.

They'll all go. The national dailies like the mirror, star, herald, etc will go first, but the local weeklies will be next and they'll fall nationwide in very rapid succession. Last to go will be the bigger dailies (independent/IT/etc).

dulpit wrote: »

Sweet Jesus.

Where's the lie?

Anyway, I'll refrain from making this thread even more political than I already have. Let's get back to focusing on celebrating the ongoing demise of the print media!

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

The immigrants who live here just want to earn enough to pay for rent/mortgage, household bills and to send their kids to school, so blaming them for the decline of provincial towns, when often they help to keep teacher numbers and community organisations healthy, is a bit rich.

[deleted due to it being baseless, off-topic ranting]

EDIT: It most certainly was not baseless or off-topic. And calling it a "rant" is just you poisoning the well.

But the fact remains, their presence IS changing the makeup of towns all across the nation. Culturally, politically, socially, linguistically, religiously. In ways big and small. This is an empirical fact. This causes the identity of a town to get blown out. To literally become "diverse". Diverse means no majority or pre-eminent culture or consistent expectation of ways of being and interacting with your community. So it's understandable that this would cause, on average, people to identify less with "their town" and by extension, with what's going on within it. Aka, local news.

So we don't buy our local paper because... well why bother? We don't recognize it as reflecting "us" anymore. Because there is no "us". So hello declining newspaper sales.

Now before anyone strawmans any of that, I think it's actually a fairly minor reason for the decline of local newspaper sales. It's a factor, but also well down the list of reasons. The main reason is that Facebook took over the social and voyeuristic element, the quality of writing is atrocious, the price too high (and rising), the internet took the jobs ads, the real estate listings and increasingly the obituries, and nobody actually cares about some random guy you don't know who was up in district court and got a €30 fine for not picking up his dog's poop.

An Ciarraioch wrote: »

No, blame planners for taking footfall out of town centres through suburban shopping complexes, and online websites for diverting commerce from local independent stores.

I don't disagree with any of this. But please don't get me started on the midwits known as local council planning committees or I'll derail this thread for good

jmcc wrote: »

I'm not sure that the IT has such a bright digital future given that it has a track record of disaster (apart from the sale of Ireland.com) on the Web.

The Independent seems to be trying to pull a race to the bottom with pricing. This is similar to what Murdoch did with the Redtops in the UK but it may not be effective with the Independent.

Regards...jmcc

Not to mention they both have very suspicious claims about their true subscription numbers. "Inflated" is putting it mildly.

I don't actually think either will bridge the digital gap in the long-run enough to survive. Monsters like the NYT will (plus WaPo, WSJ and maybe one or two others). But none of the irish papers will make it. RTE will be subsidised by the state and provide any relevant national news coverage. All the rest is opinion or investigative and will be done for zero cost and more effectively by aspiring indie journalists with a twitter account and a patreon page. It's already happening.

flogen wrote: »

Please stick to the topic of the decline of traditional media and avoid using this thread to spout your uninformed assumptions about people.

It was highly relevant to the discussion of traditional media decline and I can assure you I am far from uninformed on the topic. Your bias is showing. But I'll refrain from explicitly political commentary.

jmcc wrote: »

The problem is not with the true subscription figures but in the lack of analysis and breakdown of those figures. Say a well known paper claims that it has 58K digital subscriptions. That may well be true. But the breakdown of those subscriptions can provide indications of the money made from the subscriptions. How many were one day/weekly subscriptions? How many were introductory offers that were not taken up? How many were annual subscriptions? The real blood trail statistic is the number of new subscriptions versus the number of dropped subscriptions.

Regards...jmcc

Right. When they don't break out the details in the quarterly reports, I think it's fair to assume the quality of those subs is not the highest.