Are local newspapers coming to an end?

Well we don’t get our local paper anymore. I don’t know the reason why we don’t, I think it is because it is available at work, so we can have a look at it there.

Most local papers are already gone:

- Most local papers are owned by large media companies
– Most local papers are simply reprinting wire stories with little local news collection involved.

From what I hear, the very local papers are still faring better than the major papers. They provide coverage of neighborhood concerns that isn’t easily available elsewhere.

I agree with @Harp. Just like any business that evolves, you have to redefine your niche or get out of the business. Even cable news is suffering because times have changed.

I would subscribe in a heartbeat to a paper that covered my neighborhood in detail. School board meetings, neighborhood associations and perhaps local people bios I would gladly pay for.

The newspaper industry is going through a change. Eventually, newspapers as we know them may well become a thing of the past. Some are migrating to the Web successfully.

In niche areas mostly.

I don’t think it is clear how things will shape out as the content machines that were newspapers, which also fed TV news and Web sources disappear.

Somehow, that content generation will need to remain.

As a local newspaper employee, I can tell you business is slower. However we are still doing pretty good. We are very local in our news content, we are free to our readers and delivered to every home in the county, the advertisments and insterts pay for the paper, and we have a large Amish community that only has newspapers as a form of advertisment and news. Also much of the county is rural and many people here still only have dial up. Like Harp said I think being very local does help, you can’t find the news we print easily on the internet.

Our local paper has a boost from funds supplied by the municipality and offers local detail not available from other news publications so it’s doing ok. Being a niche provider, I suspect they will continue to do well, as the larger papers can’t readily afford the cost of providing the same local news and the online availability of the information is disparate (there about a dozen different sites one must visit to pull together the same news). There has been some talk of starting an online edition but the community at large is an older one and at this point it seems unlikely it would compete directly with the print edition. At the same time they have had to cut back a bit on space due to drops in local ad revenue but that’s to be expected.

Major dailies will go under before small community papers do.

Eenerweiner….......thanks for responding. do you believe the Amish people are mainly responsible for your newspapers survival?

Yes, definitely at some point there will be no physical form of the newspaper. That’s what the internets is for!

“That’s what the Internet is for!”

That is a sad statement, but an eventuality. I am not bringing my laptop to the beach and will go blind trying to read from the iPhone.

No I don’t think they are mainly responsible, only partially. Since they do not have TVs or radios it does force those who want their business to advertise in print and if the Amish want to sell big things they will run classified ads with us. Inserts are also another big thing that keeps the paper going. It is much cheaper for big companies like Walgreens and Sears to pay us to insert their weekly flyers into our paper than to mail them out directly or use a subscrition paper with much less circulation.

I’d echo the response that the daily national papers are in more trouble. Our local paper published six times a week. In the event of a massive circulation decline it would become a weekly paper and then a monthly but such an action would be spread over a few years at least.

Like a lot of local papers it is owned by a larger media group. Although thankfully not one of the huge ones which is buying up radio and newspapers then attacking the BBC for improving their local coverage.

I agree with @Harp our local paper is doing really well. I will point out that it’s a weekly and not a daily though. It’s always been weekly. (Don’t forget I live in a really rural area so it’s normal here). We can get two daily papers from nearby cities but they don’t cover our area. And all of our newspaper is local stuff – nothing from the wires. The only time major news or country news is covered is when it personally affects someone in the area or from the area. Just to give you an idea of what gets covered, in December someone went through all of downtown and cut all the Christmas lights. That was a major story! It sounds corny I know, but I love our local paper and I’m glad it’s doing so well. Maybe the bigger papers need to start writing about more gossipy items?

Ive been following this debate in the national press here in Britain, and to be honest nobody seems to know the answer.
Most local papers here seem to be owned by large corporations such as The Johnston Press, and I’ve noticed the price has risen considerably in the last few years.
We only buy it for what local news there is in it, but the major concern with their decline on local democracy – then local councillors can get away with murder with no reporting of what theyre up to.
Theres very little if any “in depth” reporting as it is.
Here in Britain we have very few local radio stations and local television is non-existant.
Its very concerning

The Internet has a long way to go before it supersedes the the written word in Trinidad. ICT penetration was 17.3% in 2008, (although there is reason to believe that it is much higher because many people have access at work, in the libraries and in the cyber cafes). Newspaper circulation remains high among the local dailies, not to mention the weekend tabloids, etc.