Friday, June 24, 2011

The end of newspapers as we knew them

... we journalists can never stop looking back... back to the
days of printed copies selling in their millions on a daily basis...
back to an era of seemingly unlimited advertising. ...

Roy Greenslade wrote a marvelous piece about the
steady decline of newspapers in the UK, a decline that
only becomes apparent when looking at the numbers,
the decline of circulation.

In 1966, the Daily Mirror sold 5.1m copies a day, the
Daily Express 4m and the Daily Telegraph 1.4m. Last month,
those titles had circulations of 1.2m, 631,000 and 635,000
respectively.

Those were the days, my friends, ... 

Update: the phone hacking of Milly Dowler, a 13 year old girl
slain in 2002 could eventually be the trigger for some serious
media criticism of the general public who is now learning of a
really disgusting case of the practices of media misfits. The further
decline of newspaper circulation, particularly the tabloids, is
pretty sure the result of this.

Murdoch's British newspapers are all loss makers since years.
The phone hacking scandals with all the libel damage cases
related will lead to a considerable further deterioriation of the
financial situation of those newspapers.

Update: The News of The World is closing.

Kudos for Melissa Harrison who organized the Twitter campaign
that target advertisers, a real highlight in that affair:
Why I set about hitting the News of The World where it hurts

Nick Davies (here in a video), the Guardian reporter who is a
long time critic of media and who was crucial in uncovering and
reporting that scandal wrote the book "Flat earth news", a books
of course soon talked down as silly, not really interesting, is
nevertheless a book of interest. It reads even better after
the closure of NoWT.

No comments: