Like an April Fool's joke gone bad, The Chicago Sun Times announced that it filing for bankruptcy on April 1st. This follows the filing of bankruptcy by The Tribune Company (publisher of Chicago Tribune) in December and the Philadelphia company that publishes Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com in February. In addition, Ann Arbor News will cease publishing its print newspaper and be available online only in July. And the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press have begun a 3 day a week publishing schedule.
Ad revenue is too low and costs are too high to keep up. Any publishers who are not rethinking their strategies for the future will not be around for too long. As sad as this is - because surely this is the end of an era where people depended on printed newspapers, we need to look ahead at new opportunities in the online world. Or we can hold onto the last bastion of newspapers, much as some writers clung on to their typewriters in a world where computer technology and word processors galloped forward and took over. Once this started, it didn't take long for it to come full circle, and the clinging, undoubtedly, did not last long either.
To see this in a financial perspective, here is a link to an article published in January by the Silicon Alley Insider which states that printing the New York Times costs twice as much as sending each and every NYT subscriber a free kindle! Those are not cheap - today's price on Amazon.com is $359 a pop!
But the economics are just failing to support this industry, and the current economic climate is accelerating the inevitable. We need to look upon this as the passing of a baton from one type of medium to one or more other media. So that we look upon it less like a death and more like a transition.
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