The Newspaper Industry

Notes in the class of New Media, lecture by Carly Stiana Scheffer

Newspapers are printed products created on a regular basis and released in multiple
copies. Printing press was invented in mid 1400s by Johannes Gutenberg. the first
regularly published English-language newspaper from the 1600s was Daily Courant.
There are three elements of newspaper: (1) Modern newspaper did not arrive in a flash
– as a result of one mentor’s grand change; (2) The newspaper as a medium of
communication developed on a result of social and legal responses to technology during
different periods; and (3) The newspaper as a medium of communication existed long
before the existence of the book industry.

Overview of contemporary newspaper industry:

 Weeklies:
o 4 coverage topics: neighborhoods, cities, suburbs, ethnicity, race, interest
communities
o Alternative weekly: paper written for an urban audience with interests in
political and cultural commentary
o Shoppers: aimed at people who might shop at local merchants, designed to
deliver coupons and ads
 Dailies:
o Circulation of printed dailies newspapers moved downward over the past
quarter-century
o Poor state of the economy and the availability of other digital sources threatens
the business
o Most of the dailies in the U.S. are controlled by a few large firms

Financing the newspaper business:

Advertisement: the most dominant source of money
 Freestanding Inserts (FSI): preprinted sheets that advertise particular products,
services, or retailers
 Cost per Thousand Readers (CPM/Cost Per Mill): measurement of advertising
efficiency, used by advertisers to evaluate how much space they will buy in a
medium and how much they will pay
 Advertising refers to three different areas: retail advertising from companies with
local outlets, classified ads, and national ads
o Retail ads: local retail ads are carried out by establishments located in the same
geographic area as the newspaper. Persuade people to shop in the local outlets
o Classified ads: short announcement for a product or service that is typically
grouped with announcements for other products or services of the same kind
o National ads: ads placed by large national and multinational firms that do
business in a newspaper’s geographic area
Circulation
 Advertisers typically buy space in newspapers because of circulation numbers
 Two circulation issues:
o Whether young people will stop reading printed papers and shift to electronic
media
o Whether young people or anyone are willing to pay for digital newspaper in
amounts that will allow newspaper to survive
 Newspaper publisher’s inability to attract new young readers is a major factor in
circulation declines

PRODUCTION
 Creating Newspaper Content
o Newspaper’s publisher is in charge of the entire company’s operation: financial
issues, production issues, editorial issues
o Advertising-editorial Ratio: set by the publisher, this ratio determines the
balance between the amount of space available for ads and editorial matter in
ones issue of a newspaper
o News hole: number of pages left over available for editorial matter
o Editor: executive in charge of all the operations required to fill the news hole
o Managing editor: person who coordinates the work of the sections within the
newspaper
o General assignment reporter: reporter covering topics in their department
o Beats: specific, long-termn assignment covering a single topic area
o Freelancers: workers who make a living by accepting and completing creative
assignments from a number of different newspapers
 o Wire services: organizations that supplies newspaper with a continual steam of
hard news and feature stories about international, national, and state topics via
high-speed telephone, cable, and/or internet connections
o Syndicates: companies that sell soft news, editorial matter, cartoons and
photographs to newspaper for use
o Copy editors: people who edit stories written by reporters

 Technology of Publishing the Paper

o Computers and digital technology are the mainstays of contemporary
newspapers
o Paginaiton: the ability to compose and display completed pages, with pictures
and graphics, on screen
o The cost of smaller papers are low enough that classified notices and ads from
local merchants can support these small papers
o Some observers see these smaller local newspapers as providing a wider range
of information to their audiences than the dailies provided

DISTRIBUTION
 Newspaper distribution: bringing the finished issue to the point of exhibition
 Physically: sending it to their home or news stand
 Digitally: textual, graphical, and video stories

EXHIBITION
Relevant as subscription and pain-in-advance applies
Achieving total market coverage
Decrease in receiving virtually – cannot provide total market coverage (TMC). TMC
is reaching nearly all households in a newspaper’s market area. Options for TMC are: (1)
Direct mail firms: ad firms mailing ads directly to consumers’ homes; (2) Marriage mail
outfits: ad firms specializing in delivering circular ads that might be inserts as FPIs in
newspaper, they produce sheets and brochurse from several ads that are bundled together
Key Industry Issue: building readership – involving analog & digital strategies
 Building Print Readership
o Colorful and attractive layout
o Sections designed to attract crucial audiences
 o Emphasizing localism
 Building Digital Readership
o Podcasts: audio recordings that can be downloaded to MP3 players
o Mobil feed: stories specifically formatted for the user’s device
o RSS feed: flow of stories on topics the reader chose that the newspaper sends to
the individual’s ocmputer so that the user doesn’t have to go to the paper’s
website to see
o Newspaper companies have been buying properties that increase their audience
to attract mroe advertisers than individual papers.
o Paywall: barrier prevents people from accessing digital material without first
paying money
o Put ads in all feed to study audiences’ interest

ETHICS & NEW MODELS OF JOURNALISM

 Use of newspapers’ work without paying them: fill pages with what they have
written in the newspaper, and with links to those papers.
 Content farms: turns out thousands of pieces of “news” a day with the aim of
catching people’s interest on search engines. They keep track in what is trending –
put out the words in the headline for more clicks on the site.