It is no secret to the world that the world of journalism is slowly, but surely crumbling. Newspapers come to the door thinner with less content and one source can be blamed: the Internet.
An article on www.americanprogress.org said it best when they described newspapers by this description: “If newspapers were a baseball team, they would be the Mets—without the hope for “next year.”
Veteran media executive Alan Mutter, an expert observer of the decline of newspapers, has found these depressing statistics:
-Newspaper revenue fell to its lowest level since 1984, although adjusted for inflation the income is actually worth half of what papers earned back then.
-Combined ad sales for all the newspapers in America in 2011 equaled barely two-thirds of the sales by Google alone.
-These declines only accelerated in the fourth quarter of 2011, indicating that the worst is yet to come.
-Digital revenue, once the industry’s hope for economic revival, grew only 6.8 percent during 2011, which is not fast enough to make up for advertising losses.
More of this interesting article can be viewed at: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/media/news/2012/03/22/11254/think-again-the-end-of-newspapers-and-the-decline-of-democracy/
Well, that doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
