Time Magazine claims these are the next newspapers to go the way of the PI:

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. The New York Daily News

9. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram

10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

20 replies on “The Bad News”

  1. I find myself excessively sad about this; especially given that I haven’t purchased a paper in years and am processing this loss online.

  2. Charles,
    I agree. I think it’s very bad. I see it as sign of decline. All my adult life, I have subscribed to a newspaper whenever I’ve lived stateside (Chicago Tribune, NY Times and now, the Seattle P-I). I find it most disheartening that we are losing the printed word to the electronic word. I actually think the Seattle Times is doomed. I fear many great cities will not have a daily printed newspaper. To me it shows a sign of class division that may be intractable. Why? Because those that can’t afford or don’t know how to access electronic media will have an information (unless they watch alot of TV, which isn’t good) deficit. As a result of this great economic collapse, more people will be unable to access electronic media. I’m deeply saddened by the newspaper’s demise.

  8. Newspaper publishers need to collectively develop a sub-$100 portable e-reader, and also work with mobile phone companies to integrate more news friendly apps onto phones, that can quickly get to news with a single button press. Then sell ads on the mobile news pages, and have a premium service pay-subscription service that includes more features. Also they should consider placing e-readers in public places like coffee shops, diners, etc.

  9. Those major newspapers are doo-doo. They’re inflated with sensationalist reporting from self-loving journalists who think they are THE representatives of the world. The Stranger does it right (I loved the contribution from *that one guy* on *that one local tv station* on Sunday); keep it local, keep it simple, and keep it within the wants and needs of your target audience. The target audience of the major newspapers is mostly dead.

  10. *yawn*

    I’m so over hearing this same tired drivel everyday.

    Please SLOG find some actual news. Repeating the same stories is driving away readers.

  11. @10: Oddly enough, this story is about the impact of internet news aggregation sites on the newsgathering industry’s continued viability.

    So, you know, go read TMZ and stop bothering the grownups.

  12. These Blacksmiths are close to bankruptcy, and may soon stop producing horse shoes, leaving their respective metropolitan areas with either a single horse shoe producer, or none at all:

    1. Barnaby & Sons, New York
    2. William Smithy’s Fine Iron Emporium, Washington DC
    3. The Philadelphia Iron Works, Philidelphia
    4. Rodgers’ Iron Smith, Minneapolis
    5. Horse Shoes ‘R’ Us, Chicago

  15. Man, this blows. The Star-Tribune is 100x better than the Pioneer Press (fair disclosure, I used to be a P-P paperboy,) and has twice the natural audience. Why the fuck is the P-P thriving and not the Strib?

  18. Sad though it is, the printed news era is ending—and has been ending for long enough to suggest it isn’t about to change course and come back.

    Journalism is moving onto a new medium and finds itself, along with its audience, confronted with a bewildering new range of opportunities for success and failure.

    Still, the desire for quality journalism remains, and whether it’s presented on newsprint or LCD display, that desire isn’t going anywhere.

    I imagine that with the end of the newpaper the undivided attention on electronic media will promote a renaissance of design and presentation, of hardware and software, of outlets and business models, such that the e-media of today will be revealed as only the barest of beginnings that it is.

    But still, I’ll miss the physical iconography of the great press roaring in the basement, its subsonic vibration palable throughout the news building—lending a gravity and heft to the act of journalism on which our dreams and hopes have so easily come to prop themselves.

    In the end though, all of that hasn’t been the heart of journalism. Rather, the deeper urge to see, to question, and, with any luck, to understand is what drives journalism. If that ever fails it won’t be the medium on which the news is published and read that’s to blame.

  19. #9 You don’t know the first thing about journalism if you think the Stranger does it right. The Stranger is entertaining and occasionally publishes something of interest, but it’s no model for future newspapers.

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