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Mar

9

Plain Dealer: #10 on TIME’s list of papers soon to fold or go digital


Read it and shake your head – because, again, with this kind of thought (that advertisers will soon realize that no one clicks on Internet ads and will then come back to the newspapers and save them – no, really, that’s what’s being suggested) being proffered by the professional journalist atmosphere, they’re only tempting the fates as they scrunch the blinders tighter.

Original story here, where they write this about the PD:

10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is in one of the economically weakest markets in the country. Its parent, Advance Publications, has already threatened to close its paper in Newark. Employees gave up enough in terms of concessions to keep the paper open. Advance, owned by the Newhouse family, is carrying the burden of its paper plus Conde Nast, its magazine group which is losing advertising revenue. The Plain Dealer will be shut or go digital by the end of next year.

And the list from the first link in this post:

Time’s predictions for the next US papers to face the chop:

1. The Philadelphia Daily News

2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune

3. The Miami Herald

4. The Detroit News

5. The Boston Globe

6. The San Francisco Chronicle

7. The Chicago Sun-Times

8. NY Daily News

9. The Fort Worth Star Telegram

10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

You can pull those blinders as tight as you want, but just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 1:31 pm March 9th, 2009 in Business, Cleveland+, Media, Ohio, Writing 

Comments

4 Responses to “Plain Dealer: #10 on TIME’s list of papers soon to fold or go digital”

  1. 1 John Kroll on March 9th, 2009 7:07 pm

    The Plain Dealer would like to note that reports of our death are greatly exaggerated. Or, in the exact word of Publisher Terrance C.Z. Egger, “baseless.”

  2. 2 anastasia on March 9th, 2009 9:18 pm

    I don’t see it. I can’t imagine the PD going entirely digital as they have barely dipped their toe into that yet and have an extremely poor grasp of the web. And I believe the PD is the only paper on that list that if it folded would leave an immense market with absolutely no newspaper at all. We don’t have a sister city like St. Paul or Dallas to pick up the slack. So that would be unprecedented, and while I know new things are happening every day, I honestly can’t imagine a market this size with NO daily newspaper. You’d be looking at a mammoth black hole as far as information, no matter how poorly the PD is doing its job, with its right-wing bias, its overemphasis on sports and its axing of a whole swath of local news that people connect with. I’m saying this one’s a bad call.

  3. 3 Elana on March 10th, 2009 1:20 am

    Was having a conversation about this exact topic over the weekend. Newspapers have made the same mistake the railroads made when airplanes were introduced — they thought they were in the rail business when really they were in the transportation business.

    The internet is simply a delivery system – it doesn’t change the need for quality news and advertisers are not going to go back to newspapers anymore than most people are going to opt to take the train across country when they can fly there in 6 hours.

  4. 4 Jill Miller Zimon on March 10th, 2009 7:04 am

    A thank you to John and here’s my follow-up post about Terry Egger’s feelings on the matter.

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