In looking at the pile of headlines to catch up on regarding the daily newspaper industry, it’s obvious that December was another horrendous month for the daily newspaper business. Unfortunately, it’s going to be even worse in 2009 for them. But here’s one last pile of stories for 2008…
• The Seattle Times is freezing non-union [...]
FitchRatings, which forecasts economic activity of the world’s major economies, released a report on the United States that predicts the U.S. economy is in for a rough year in 2009 (what a shock!) with GDP declining by 1.2%. Of particular note in the report is the brutal environment surrounding advertising, which Fitch estimates will be [...]
In anticipation of the day that the Minneapolis Star Tribune stops publishing (which could happen any week now), I’ve decided to take steps to prepare for life without a local daily. I am also interested in determining how hard it would actually be to wean myself off of an increasingly irrational addiction to a local [...]
Down 93% from it’s 52-week high, McClatchy stock hit an all-time low yesterday, dropping 13% to $.89 per share. The company now enjoys a robust market cap of $73 million. The stock is down 99% from December, 2004, making for one of the all-time great stock charts to snowboard down. Now, if we could just [...]
The Journal Register, whose stock price is now $.0039 per share, announced that it will close 16 of its Connecticut weeklies and might shut down 2 of its dailies, the Bristol Press and New Britain Herald, in January if it cannot sell them by January 12th. In no way do Bristol or New Britain qualify [...]
• Gannett is planning for more layoffs, and we all get to watch the demise in slow motion thanks to the web and the world of instant communication. Similarly, thanks to the web (and Cheezhead’s tenacious monitoring of all things recruitment), the world knew about layoffs at CareerBuilder before the company had even announced them.
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The deluge of notable stories has surpassed by ability to keep up, so once again, I am forced to simply list the highlights…
• Will Google buy the New York Times? Despite the fact that the Sulzbergers have indicated they are not interested in selling, I would say the odds are getting better and better every [...]
Without question, any city with two competing dailies or even neighboring cities with dailies can start counting the days until those dailies either merge or force each other to collapse completely. In a great piece on Followthemedia.com, Philip Stone describes two such markets: Dallas-Fort Worth and L.A.-Orange County. There are undoubtedly others, such as Seattle [...]
It was another dismal week for the daily newspaper industry. Here in Minneapolis, the Star Tribune could only muster 6 pages of employment classifieds on Sunday for thye 2nd week in a row (actually it was about 4 with 2 pages of filler). At that level, the paper has got to be inching ever closer [...]
While the focus of ‘Diggings’ is pretty varied, covering a broad range of topics related to HR, advertising, technology, recruitment advertising, job boards, and miscellaneous things I think are interesting, the most consistent focus unquestionably centers around the decline and eventual obliteration of the daily newspaper industry. It is a fascinating, endlessly rich phenomena to [...]