Michael Mandel, of BusinessWeek, just wrote a comprehensively negative report on the state of journalism in America. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic comments:
"this is, sadly, perhaps the 21st century equivalent of studying northern Atlantic nautical charts in your bedroom chamber on the Titanic. But these charts are still useful!"
So how fast is the ship sinking? If these are to be believed, what the industry is going through right now is simply the exaggeration of a trend that began in the early '90 and picked up speed around 2000 (which is just about the time a little thing called the Internet became more or less ubiquitous). In fact, Mandel makes the case that journalism's decline is worse than that of industry.
But its not limited to just newspapers. News periodicals seem to be on a similar path, though the decline is not as dramatic. Even television news is suffering through a downturn, but this seems to be more of a recent occurrence and not a long-term trend. At least not yet.
And then there's this, from Google Trends via Reason, that shows the online readership (in terms of Daily Unique Visitors) for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Huffington Post. Two years ago, the WaPo was the clear leader, and they maintained a strong edge until the run-up to the election last year (that's the spike for all three). Since then, all three have been in a virtual dead-heat.
So, just to recap, in the past two years the HuffPo has doubled their online readership while the Washington Post has seen their readership more or less cut in half. The WSJ still gets about the same, (and lets be honest, that paper will always have a pretty stable readership because of the financial coverage) making it a good control for a study like this.
I doubt the Washington Post is the only paper to have seen such a dramatic slide in the past year. It's not good news for the news.
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