65 Comments - logic not emotion - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:33 am: Sad; but predictable. - PublicServant - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:35 am: === Town by town, local journalism is dying in plain sight - Newspapers in more than 1,400 cities across the US have closed over the past 15 years, often leaving residents without a reliable source of local news === This is very troublesome, and a big blow to democracy. Real news outlets are closing At the same time IPI isn’t behind a firewall…hrrmmm, how do they do it?… - Demoralized - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:36 am: So if you have no reporters then why even have a newspaper? They don’t believe a local paper needs local reporters? - DownSouth - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:40 am: The death of local journalism is being felt throughout rural areas and small towns. There is no one left to keep any eye on nor report local and county government affairs. Even regionally, newspapers are dropping like flies or becoming so incredibly short staffed that they are a mere shadow of their former selves. It is indeed troublesome and a blow to democracy - JoanP - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:42 am: That is really sad. Not that I have anything against sports reporting, but three sports writers and only five news reporters? That’s out of whack. - L.A. - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:43 am: And we just got our renewal which ups the daily rate for home delivery to roughly $3.00 per day. Needless to say, we will not being getting the paper delivered anymore. The quality of the SJ-R has decreased tenfold since it changed hands several years ago. I hate it because I love having a newspaper in my hands and reading it every day and want to be able to keep a daily newspaper in the state capitol of Illinois, but wont pay $3.00 for that nonsense (sorry Bernie!!). Will still buy the SJ-R at the gas station on Sundays but will rely on the Tribune for state news and the Times for national news, both of which we buy at the gas station every morning. - curtis - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:44 am: I think we may be at a realization (if we weren’t already there) that news is not profitable outside of large metro areas. On the bright side, we’ve seen a growing number of non-profit newsrooms come up, especially in IL. When DNA info closed, Block Club Chicago popped up and is producing some of the best local city reporting. Capitol News Illinois is off to an amazing start and is producing incredible content and is giving IPI a run for its money. And let’s not forget BGA/ProPublica, both non-profits with amazing investigative teams. WBEZ and NPR Illinois, both producing amazing content along with all the other NPR affiliates. They invested in top tier reporters for local and state coverage, along with their unsurpassed education team. I subscribe to the SJR and a whole host of other IL papers because I value good local news. But I’m consistently finding the best news (statehouse or other) is from these non-profit newsrooms. When you take the element of profit out of it, you can truly focus on good content, not clickbait focused articles. - Michelle Flaherty - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:48 am: With the paper now printed in Peoria any weather hiccup and it’s not delivered before I leave for work, or it’s got scant information about the big game or event the night before, stuff I can easily find online. I get the paper to get information I don’t already know, to know more about the community and events and actions than I can find on Twitter or FaceBook. The tradition of having a paper is really the only reason I still subscribe, but then there are consistently days that I don’t even get it delivered and I live in town, what’s the point? - wordslinger - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:50 am: So depressing. Just three companies — Google, Facebook and Amazon — gobble up 68% of all the digital advertising revenue in the United States. Shouldn’t anti-trust protections for society come into play? https://www.geekwire.com/2019/report-shows-amazon-taking-digital-advertising-market-share-google-facebook-duopoly/ - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:51 am: LA, you can get the daily SJR delivered for about $20/month. Millennials just killed the newspaper business, when the 50+ age segment dies off, there will be no newspapers. - Token Conservative - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:55 am: This has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with Gatehouse. - Rich Miller - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:57 am: ===Millennials just killed the newspaper business== Newspaper owners have fallen for every scam in the book ever since the World Wide Web was invented. - Anon221 - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:59 am: Rocky Mountain News story on NPR- https://www.npr.org/2018/12/11/675505080/local-newspaper-closures-come-with-hefty-price-tag-for-residents - Not a Billionaire - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 10:59 am: They have papers in towns they don’t have reporters in …Some of the best papers are weeklies just to the west of Springfield …Rushville My Sterling and Pittsfield. - LathamPlace - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:01 am: JoanP - My thoughts exactly. - SAP - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:02 am: How few reporters can you have and still call yourself a newspaper? - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:03 am: I count seven news reporters, including Tamara Browning and Crystal Thomas. - Anyone Remember - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:04 am: Rich - Included in the scams was debt newspaper chains loaded up on before the Bush 43 era Meltdown. After that remember hearing the Illinois Times’ Fletcher Farrar on WMAY saying that while times were tight, they were in better shape as they hadn’t loaded up on debt. There was a reference to the Trib and Sam Zell. - Anon221 - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:04 am: More “unpacking”… http://www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/ As for me, the local paper is little more than 2-3 front page stories that may be a week old, but lots of sports coverage. The dailies in the area are very expensive for delivery, and so I, too, turn to digital and NPR for news. The current onslaught of local news on all the TV stations (4:30, 5, 6, 9, 10) covers bits but usually nothing in depth. And, that, is eaten up by extended weather and sports segments. - Fixer - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:06 am: Can we get off the kick of blaming everything on millenials? Newspapers are dying for a lot of reasons, but simply assuming it’s because them dang nab kids with their world wide webs is being blind to the actual issues that business faces. - Give Me A Break - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:09 am: The SJR’s short sided approach to providing their subscribers with content they want, started to go downhill a few years ago. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in the Springfield area knows, the Illini are a huge item of interest. So what did the big brains at the SJR do a few years ago? Eliminate John Supine who was the SJR reporter for the Illini. So we went from Supine providing detailed stories on the Illini almost year round to now having wire copy coverage that is pretty much the day of and day after games. No coverage of recruiting or stories of the team beyond games. And they wonder why people are dropping their subscriptions. - Not a Billionaire - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:09 am: Radio is close to non-existent as a news source now too. I had read most publicly owned newspapers are following wall street advice milk an till the end like they are doing with landlines. - L.A. - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:11 am: - LA, you can get the daily SJ-R delivered for about $20/month. Responding to an Anonymous is one of my pet peeves, but… Not according to the renewal notice I just got in the mail. I’m 43 years old. While I’m not a Millennial, not quite part of the over 50 crowd yet. And I still pick up the Tribune and Times at the gas station, so still contributing to print newspapers. I do read a lot of news online but still like having the newspaper in my hand. - Not a Billionaire - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:15 am: I used to own some weeklies. It was just as modems were coming with Pcs Before www. I had expected to email the news and put out a picture and Ad sheet. But I expected to charge. Mistake number one was tons of free content in the beginning. Only the WSJ was smart. Dow Jones was first and did it the way I had envisioned.All that said wait till gatehouse dies off and start a weekly . There are a lot of printed and internet options. - Amalia - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:20 am: well, this was predictable when that headline about nationwide cuts from the ownership entity came out. Peoria Journal Star should be in the cutline too. very, very sad. go to a town, any town, buy the newspaper. put it in your hands. journalists are important. support. - Southern - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:24 am: ==Newspaper owners have fallen for every scam in the book ever since the World Wide Web was invented.== This is the problem. Everything from chasing clicks to “pivot to video.” And now they’re trying to beg people to subscribe to a product that has been cheapened for more than a decade, and continues to be cheapened at a fast rate. Having subscribers who pay has been the answer all along, as Rich obviously knows, but most publishers fell for the idea that more clicks would save them. It’s too late for newspapers — they should have switched to the subscription strategy before they decimated the staffs that create their product. - lakeside - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:25 am: That is a real blow. SJRers, I’m so sorry. - Geesh - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:26 am: JoanP: with respect… if you live in areas with the local papers (Rochester Times, etc.) it’s all about pictures of kids and sports and school board meetings. Wondering why SJ-R has 3 sports reporters is a no brainer. It’s scrapbooking 101. - Not a Billionaire - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:27 am: Newm is their ticker symbol . Read the latest earnings call and you can see the future of your newspaper. - Former Employee - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:27 am: The fact is, Gatehouse has never had any idea how to run a profitable media company. Their response to declining revenues has always been “what else can we cut.” They have never once come up with a viable idea for increasing readership or page views. They still manage to give their executives 6 figures bonuses well losing millions of dollars, however . . . - The Dude Abides - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:29 am: I subscribed to the SJR for many years and in the last year finally had enough. I could not get a daily subscription for any where near $20 a month, it was double that. Several years ago I changed from daily delivery to weekends only plus internet access and was paying $20 a month. The service wasn’t good, weekend deliveries were sometimes missed and if you called them Sunday morning after the paper didn’t arrive you were sometimes told that you were out of luck. The rates would go up and then less than a year later there would be another rate increase. Springfield has a lot of state workers and Rauner’s treatment of his state workers had an effect on the local economy. When the SJR endorsed Rauner for reelection my brother in law, who works for the state, told me that was it for him and he dropped his subscription too. I think it’s only a matter of time that the capital of Illinois will no longer have a newspaper. Sad if that happens but Gatehouse has just done a poor job running their newspapers. - Old Illini - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:37 am: The Champaign News-Gazette appears healthy to me. - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:37 am: It just kills me to tune in to a local Springfield radio station in the morning to hear a guy come on and say: I’m news director (redacted), and here’s the top headlines in this morning’s State Journal-Register…” News. Director. Reading the paper into the mic like he’s LaGuardia reading the comics. And apparently, that’s the sum total of his news directing. And don’t get me started on local TV news… Illinois Times often runs circles around the SJ-R on in-depth stories. One of the SJ-R’s problems is that people online will tolerate adwalls but not paywalls. - Token Conservative - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:44 am: ====The Champaign News-Gazette appears healthy to me.==== It’s not. - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:49 am: The Dude, I’m paying $20/month for 7 day delivery. And, you can blame Rauner for the Springfield economy but include Blago in the mix. He is the guy who shipped a lot of Springfield jobs to Chicago. - Annonin' - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:56 am: It is amazing that the more detailed content does not remain available in other, non dead wood, formats. The downfall began when a lot of content folks wanted and were happy to buy are not free via the internet — movie ads, obits, school lunches, etc.. All the content providers cited by Mr/Ms Curtis are fairly limited range. Quality and accuracy always up in the air. Face it the days of sitting down and paging through the thick paper, daily or Sunday are over. What will we not need next? Libraries? - kitty - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 11:59 am: Old Illini, You’re correct about the CU News-Gazette. While its editorial board since the days of Baroness Marajen Chinigo has supported a very conservative agenda not supported by the majority of its readership, it does an outstanding job of covering local and regional events as well as providing superb Illini coverage. Sad times for the SJ-R which for decades was one of the iconic and great publications in Illinois. John Supine was outstanding, his dismissal in 2012 was a harbinger of things to come for the SJ-R. - Practical Politics - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:05 pm: The newspapers are contracting and the void is being filled by Proft. Ugh. - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:06 pm: I just heard Jason Piscia on NPR saying that it isn’t fair for people to complain about the SJ-R not being based in Springfield as if there wasn’t a crew of reporters on 9th street. Well, I guess that criticism will be more fair in a couple weeks. I used to get the paper but I dropped it for a couple reasons. The editorial board being the top one. Also, many of the articles they run have already ran on other sites 2 or 3 days previous to the SJ-R running it. This won’t get better with fewer news staff. - Southern - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:12 pm: Anonymous, if you’re paying $20/month, are you a new subscriber? If so, watch out for the automatic renewal. Here’s how one newspaper reader ended up with an $846-per-year subscription. https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2018/the-strange-case-of-the-846-subscription-offer-to-the-kansas-city-star/ - Chicagonk - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:15 pm: If the owner of SJ-R isn’t bothering to invest in the newspaper, why do people still bother to subscribe? - Secret Square - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:23 pm: Something else I’ve noticed about the SJ-R. I succumbed to one of their incessant pleas to subscribe about a year ago. Content wasn’t worth it, just piling up around the house, plus they were charging me the monthly subscription fee MORE than once a month, so I canceled. Ever since then they have been calling my cell phone 3 or 4 times (maybe more) a day for weeks at a time trying to get me to subscribe again. No other advertiser, robocaller or spammer calls me as much as they do. I recognize the number now and just ignore the calls. - 332bill - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:36 pm: LA, I live in a rural area outside of Springfield and got a notice late last year that my 7/day delivery rate for the SJR was going to be $50+/mo. When I called to cancel they offered me a $31/mo. rate, so I am still a subscriber. - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:38 pm: Fixer, millennials do have shorter attention spans and would rather read a one-paragraph nugget online than an in-depth article in a newspaper. And they would rather not pay for news when the money can be spent on avocado toast and messenger bags. Other institutions that require an attention span — such as live theater, the opera, and symphonies — also are not supported by millennials. - L.A. - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 12:39 pm: -And, you can blame Rauner for the Springfield economy but include Blago in the mix. He is the guy who shipped a lot of Springfield jobs to Chicago. This has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the SJ-R and price per daily delivery of the paper. - Annonin' - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:06 pm: Back in day — as the geezers like to recall — the paper had columnist named Al Manning. 3 days a week he would devote about half his column to state work force salary hikes. Best read part of SJ-R. Now Mendoza hands that out for free… every day. - thoughts matter - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:19 pm: I switched to 5 day internet, 2 day delivery a few years ago. Mainly because of the revewal price which was a lot more than $20 even then. And their forced payment for their premium editions which I didn’t even want. Then I switched the Saturday to internet when they couldn’t properly deliver it for 3 weeks in a row. Rural delivery, so not a teenager. Like LA, I like to linger over the printer page with a cup of coffee. But, these days I can read the entire paper in 10 minutes and not really have learned anything new. Laying off local staff doesn’t help that. - LakeCo - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:22 pm: Anonymous, any credibility you had evaporated at “avocado toast.” - Kayak - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:23 pm: Even more reason to support the local Illinois Times. - Older Millennial - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:35 pm: Anonymous at 12:38 - Nice use of Millennial tropes in your comment. I can’t stand this blame everything on one generation thing, as if every single member of an entire cohort of people is the exact same. Let’s be more realistic about the economic realities facing many people across generations, not just millennials. Maybe millennials are not subscribing to newspapers or going to the opera or live theater performances because it’s a budget item that can be eliminated as “entertainment” and shifting those dollars towards student loan repayment, mortgages, childcare, Roth IRAs, or groceries, which, gasp, may or may not include avocados and bread. - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:36 pm: - I live in a rural area outside of Springfield and got a notice late last year that my 7/day delivery rate for the SJR was going to be $50+/mo. When I called to cancel they offered me a $31/mo. rate, so I am still a subscriber. - I too live in rural Springfield and am hoping this is what will happen when we cancel. I holding out for a sweetheart deal. - L.A. - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:40 pm: darn it, Anonymous at 1:36 was me. - VBL - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:42 pm: Yes, millennials have a different way of consuming content, but that is not the only reason papers are dying. The truth is that fewer people of all ages look at news anymore, even free content, I had a meeting recently with 5 other people and was shocked when only one of them knew what I was talking about when I brought up a recent national news story that was heavily covered everywhere. - wordslinger - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 1:53 pm: –Only the WSJ was smart. Dow Jones was first and did it the way I had envisioned.– When they finally got around to it. But they were late on the digital revolution. No way Bloomberg should have been able to start from nothing and grow into a powerhouse like that. Dow Jones already had all the content, they just didn’t believe in the future of the technology. They stuck with the print-only model for a very long time. - Anonymous - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 2:05 pm: Yes Older it’s all being spent on student loans and groceries and not multiple subscriptions to streaming service and the latest smart phone. The reason the criticism stings is it’s true. Even those cultural events with free or reduced admissions are poorly attended by your generation. And last time I checked voting is free but look at the demographics for the latest municipal election. Why vote when you can watch kitten videos on YouTube in your animal onesie? - Behind the Scenes - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 3:34 pm: We renewed our 7-day delivery subscription in December for just over $60/ month, paid quarterly. That’s for ‘motor route’ delivery, which means it is put into a box out at streetside - most days. The subscription also entitles us to online viewing, with only 2-3 paywall hits a week to reconfirm that we are subscribers; and the “Subscribe” banner popping up every time we go to the site or move within the site. With 5 reporters, you still see one, sometimes two, locally reported stories on the front page along with the ad across the bottom. Then open the paper to page after page of Associated Press coverage with the very liberal slant. While the news staff shrinks, the ad staff is doing real well. Yesterday’s paper had a full-page ad, in color, for an accounts payable clerk. - Shemp - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 3:38 pm: The loss of local journalism truly is a blow to democracy. How many public boards receive ZERO coverage of their activities? Newspapers and journalism schools didn’t help themselves though either. We’ve been through a lot of reporters here. Not many of them were good with accuracy, and few of them, wanted to know anything beyond surface value. Offering to teach a reporter something they were reporting about is often met with offense or even contempt, if not at least dismissiveness. Then because journalists aren’t taught nuances and intricacies of the topics they cover, the baffle them with b.s. crowd wins and in-depth reporting is out the window. It almost became self-defeating. Revenues got the squeeze and the quality and amount of content went down. As the quality and quantity dropped, so did more subscribers and thus the death spiral of many local papers. Now deadlines trump content. Reporters are stretched thin, and no one’s left to report and do interviews on local sports and school boards. One, maybe two or three reporters get left to cover a dozen school boards, another dozen cities and villages, a county or two, half a dozen townships, some fire districts, plus the court, fire and police reports, planning boards, subcommittees, then add in community events, significant deaths, any feel good stories and it’s no wonder the coverage is lacking and newspapers are filled with wire service stories available elsewhere. - Not a Billionaire - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 3:55 pm: Word Bloomberg also beat them on the most lucrtive. They have all the instant price data need for bond and stock trading. DJ used to have a real with quotron and blew it. - Keyser Soze - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 3:58 pm: I read both the SJ-R and the News-Gazette. They have similar circulations and, at one time, they were similar in content. The News-Gazette is locally relevant and seemingly doing well. By comparison, the SJ-R seems to be in a downward spiral, less relevant day by day. Sad. - m4a - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 6:03 pm: Every time a hedge fund buys something, the financiers make out like bandits and the businesses shut down…love to see an investigative report on this. - MyTwoCents - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 6:03 pm: Newspapers have really become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The head honchos who are still making a killing can try to deny it, but if you offer an inferior product, nobody is going to want to sell. Two thoughts on the SJ-R vs. News-Gazette. 1) I think it helps the News-Gazette that they bought up all those local papers throughout East Central Illinois. To me, that has become a mutually beneficial relationship. The local communities still get reporters covering the area (arguments about the quality of reporting aside, at least there is coverage), and the News-Gazette gets the benefit of reporters covering areas outside of Champaign-Urbana, since content is shared between the News-Gazette and the local papers. 2) Personally, the SJ-R’s HS sports coverage is vastly inferior to the News-Gazette’s and let’s be real, HS sports coverage sells papers. Everybody like’s seeing their names in the papers, or their kid’s name, or their grandkid’s name, etc. For SJ-R, if it’s not football, basketball or baseball, it barely exists and the News-Gazette seems to have a lot more coverage of all the sports. - miss the newsprint - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 7:20 pm: It’s been several years since we subscribed to any newspapers because we learned that the subscriptions were reduced to cover the cost of special supplements. $3-$5 is deducted for each special supplemental section they throw in. Each deduction reduces the term of your subscription because you paid for 4 weeks at $3 per week and you were just “robbed” of one week because the Spring Home Improvement supplement cost $3. We complained–copying everyone from the editor to the subscription manager–pointing out that when you subscribe to a magazine, you pay for 12 issues and you receive 12 issues regardless of what the content was. We actually subscribed to three different newspapers at one time. The content dwindled and the delivery service continued to decline. The papers were no longer delivered before 6 am so you could read them before leaving for work. Sad to say–the newspapers drove themselves out of business by not delivering a quality product figuratively and literally. - btowntruth from forgottonia - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 8:00 pm: ===Millennials just killed the newspaper business== How many of them made the decision at the newspapers to double and triple subscription costs and to decrease the contents in the printed editions by 25%-50% - filmmaker prof - Monday, Mar 11, 19 @ 9:06 pm: The News Gazette has zero ethics. I hope it dies. - Peoria Rules - Tuesday, Mar 12, 19 @ 7:37 am: My father in law works for The Hawkeye Newspaper in Burlington, IA, purchased 1.5 years ago by Gatehouse. They are doing the same thing there. Gatehouse has all but destroyed the Peoria Journal Star. They are doing it everywhere else, apparently, as well. Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.