Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry. Rich cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper. What started as layoffs and buyouts, are edging towards closures and bankruptcies. While the Internet may kill the daily newspaper as we know it, it has also allowed some papers to increase their readership by tenfold.

Newspaper web sites attract more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 – a record, at a 12% increase over a year ago. Recent analysis shows that 40% of all Internet users visit a newspaper site. The Web is the future, yet newspapers are hemorrhaging money because online advertising accounts for only approximately 10% of total ad revenue.

The Web format, in its current form, will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation’s biggest papers. Contributors to sites like The Huffington Post make low to no pay because they can afford to work for free unlike average journalists who work for wire services like the Associated Press.

Tags: newspaper

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