End Times
Yes, I still feel like a fool every morning when my paid-for LA Times arrives carrying news and features first presented five days previous for free online.
Other people have been quicker to act, as this chart of declining circulation shows:
As you can see, in the 20 years that I’ve been reading it, the LA Times has lost fully half its readership. (Through no fault of my own: Again, I’m the dummy still paying for it.)
There are two kinds of newspapers that continue to prosper and, yes, even grow: community newspapers and ethnically specific (often foreign-language) papers. And, as witnessed above, there’s the Wall Street Journal, which provides its own example. What characteristic do they all share? They all serve a specific function or niche. Want to know what’s going on in, say, Burbank? Then you might check out The Burbank Times, which recently doubled its page count (and therefore its local coverage) and its distribution. What’s major newspaper in Los Angeles is growing? La Opinion, which serves readers in Spanish.
And then there’s the Times, which mystifyingly for the entire 21 years at least that I have been here has somehow not pursued being the newspaper of record for the entertainment industry. The Times, which first turned its various metro sections into the California section, and then eliminated that section, reducing all “local” coverage into an area easily stored in a matchbox. You can find out some of what’s going on in downtown LA’s City Hall (which is almost entirely irrelevant to many of us) and some of what’s going on in Sacramento, but little about those environs between — including the San Fernando Valley, where I live, population 1.7 million, which is more people than live in 12 different states (Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, and Vermont), each with at least one daily newspaper entirely to itself.
In its zeal to serve a little of everything to everyone, the Times is serving almost nothing to almost no one.