

The Great Disruption: Newspapers versus New Media - mjfern
http://fernblog.com/home/2009/4/24/the-great-disruption-newspapers-versus-new-media.html

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ggchappell
> ... a century ago most U.S. cities (about 689) had more than one daily
> newspaper. Today fewer than 15 cities have competing papers.

Yes, but the reasons behind that huge shift are probably irrelevant to the
point the article is making.

A century ago, any sizable town in the U.S. would have had a Republican
newspaper and a Democrat newspaper. The big cities also had Socialist
newspapers, etc. But somewhere in the intervening decades the market changed,
and people began expecting newspapers to be less overtly partisan. Thus, we
saw mergers all over the country, which is why large parts of the U.S. are now
full of newspapers with hyphenated names.

This was an interesting phenomenon, and I would like to learn more about why
it happened. However, it appears to me that this has little to do with the
recent severe decline in newspaper revenues.

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mjfern
The point I was making was that despite newspapers facing little or no local
competition from other traditional newspapers they are still struggling
financially.

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ggchappell
Ah, I see. I missed that.

