To read the national headlines, it seems 2009 could be the year that the newspaper industry goes the way of the Dodo.
However, now would be the time for us to raise a shaky finger and say something like, in our best Monty Pythonesque voice, “But we’re not dead yet.”
Yes, this is a rough time for newspapers. Make no mistake, the death of the 158-year old Rocky Mountain News in Colorado last week was grim and, with this past Monday’s announcement The Ann Arbor News in Michigan will close up shop in July, the future looks even grimmer.
It’s looking more and more likely The San Francisco Chronicle will fold soon, leaving a major American city without a daily newspaper for the first time in U.S. history.
According to the website that tracks the industry, at least 120 newspapers have folded since Jan. 2008 and among those that remain, 21,000 jobs have been eliminated during the same period.
Yes, it’s rough. Yet, even while we tighten our belts here at LCN, we fully expect to survive, if not thrive, in the years ahead.
Yes, the economy is in the dumps. Yes, advertising is down, and these days it’s hard to find two spare nickels to rub together, but we are not at death’s door. Not yet.
Sorry to let you down CNN and Time magazine, but we are not. Compared to this time last year, our circulation is actually up. Up slightly, to be honest, but up nonetheless.
Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad, not for us anyway. Us in this case are your friendly neighborhood weeklies, newspapers like us who are spread out all across the country. As a group we are not thriving, but we are doing fine.
In fact, the same numbers that predict the death of our industry also indicate that more people are consuming more media than ever before.
Even before we premiered our brand spanking new website last October our web traffic rivaled that of our print edition and we expect our web presence to continue to draw more and more attention in the years ahead.
It is no secret that, at some point in the future, our web readership is likely to outstrip our print edition.
People are reading. People, young people, are absorbing news. True, more and more they are taking it on their Blackberries, Twitter accounts, blogs and Facebook postings, but the demand for news is there and it is not likely to go away soon.
That’s where we come in. We are a local paper, your local paper. When bloggers start covering selectmen’s meetings and town meeting reports are blogged online in real time, that will be something new we will have to contend with, and we will.
We are not going anywhere.
