What Will be the Fate of Local Newspapers?

Company A owns newspapers 1, 2, and 3 in the immediate area and some other newspapers here and there. Company B buys out Company A, and its press release emphasizes that the future of journalism is digital, not print.

Diverse experiments with generating sustainable print/digital business models are being conducted nationwide and in other developed nations. The Economist, makes the news gathering and news dissemination are moving away from centralized control by massive entities and is returning to amorphous exchanges between individuals and among small groups. There are Facebook and Twitter and websites and email and electronic sources with private audiences and networks.

The company which publishes the Oakland Press (years ago the Pontiac Press), the Daily Tribune (to both of which I subscribe), and the Macomb Daily has been purchased by another company.* "My"  two papers are struggling: OakPress still publishes daily, but it's getting thin and understaffed and has reached out to freelance bloggers to cover, especially, evening public meetings. The Trib is understaffed and has joined the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press in publishing three or four days a week, including Sunday. The Macomb Daily publishes daily.

All those newspapers also maintain some sort of online presence.

It is inevitable that the new owner will make changes of one sort or another: Go weekly, as did the Christian Science Monitor (CSM); Consolidate the OakPress and the Trib; Terminate one or both of them; Convert totally to online news delivery. AOL is experimenting nationally with setting up local online daily "newspapers." royaloak.patch.com is one local example. The world is watching to see whether AOL's business model proves sustainable.

My mention of CSM is more than a hint that our local problems reflect national, even worldwide, developments. The search for sustainable new business models – for print or digital or combinations of both – is being vigorously conducted. A sense of the scope of those developments comes through in the excerpts below from a 16-page special report, "The News Industry" in the July 9 issue of The Economist.

• American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead.
• The real trouble that a lot of U.S. news organizations have is that they are defined by geography -- by how far trucks could go to deliver papers in the morning.
• Newspapers in western Europe [boldface, theirs] are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain.
• [Abroad] Most news outlets [print and television] are openly partisan. Thanks toIndia's vast population, there is scope for growth in print media for years to come.
• New business models are proliferating as news organizations search for novel sources of revenue.
• It is clear that revenue from online advertising alone will not be enough to cover the costs of running a traditional news organization.
• News providers throughout the rich world are starting to charge for content on the web and mobile devices. ... Existing readers of newspapers and magazines are generally unwilling to pay for news online or on mobile devices if it costs them extra.