Here’s what the WNU editor has to say:
Media is losing its audience. There are now so many alternatives to getting the news that the old ways of reading a newspaper or watching the news on TV just no longer hold. Twenty-five years ago I would easily go through six major news papers a day and watch the evening news every night. Today .... I get all of my news from the web, and from sources that I trust.
The old “standards” are deep in debt, laying off all sorts of staff. Ratings are in the tank.
Legacy magazine brands that were once considered must-reads, like Sports Illustrated, struggled to find suitors. Magazine titans like Conde Nast are expected to miss their revenue numbers given a bleak advertising forecast.
Univision, one of the largest media companies that serves America's fastest-growing population, is looking for a buyer to help it crawl out of a massive debt hole, driven by a private equity investment gone bad.
The two biggest local newspaper holding groups — New Media (GateHouse and Gannett) and McClatchy, which collectively house over 700 newspapers — had a combined market cap value as of Thursday of less than $800 million. By comparison, Apple, which this year launched its own news product, is worth more than $1.2 trillion.
Meanwhile, several other papers serving major markets closed, like the 150-year-old Vindicator in Youngstown, Ohio and the beloved OC Weekly in California.
And people now routinely surf the web to find news sources unheard of just s few years ago.
More @ A year of media upheaval