The death of the printing press next?

As people in the newspaper biz know, more and more community-type non-daily papers are simply shutting down. More and more small dailies, and even some big ones, have cut back to a non-daily print schedule. Some 30 have outrightly closed, and that doesn't count non-COVID, "regular" declining newspaper industry closures; I know of two this year within 100 miles of me.

So, printing press owners have fewer customers, and the ones remaining have fewer print jobs.

Meaning that printing press owners are themselves hurting.

And getting cutthroat in some of the discounts they'll offer.

A decade ago, it was still a commonplace-type observation that many small newspapers were being bought in part for their printing presses.

Now? What if you bought a press, whether by itself or with the "cover buy" of a group of newspapers, and you've still got outstanding debt on that? Yeah, you feel you have to keep your press running, but ... if you discount enough to take new jobs, you're running harder to stand in place.

IMO, it might be better to not chase new jobs for less money, and if necessary, file for the Paycheck Protection Program. If you qualify, the next step would to see about refinancing that loan, maybe? The next step after that, or maybe before, might be to at least start some discreet feelers for possible sale.

Newspapers, coronavirus, and the dropoff in special ROP, non-ROP and ancillary ad-like revenue

What I am talking about, for the layperson, and for newspaper folks who might "aha" if I used different words, at least on the second half of the second line?

First,  for the layperson, ROP is "display ads." Or what somebody might even call "picture ads" at a non-daily newspaper if, were there office open right now, and you were to say "I want to buy an ad" and the person helping you might respond, "Picture ad or word ad?"

OK, non-ROP is those "word ads."

Classifieds, in other words.

And ROP is picture ads.

Special ROP is special sections inside a newspaper.

Everybody who knows something about newspapers, including the intelligent layperson, knows something about the ROP dropoff. Let's tackle the rest, starting with special ROP.

Right now, spring/summer travel, bridal and in a month, graduations would be among these special sections.

Travel? When it's unclear what will reopen, and things like musical and sports events, in some cases, or entertainment sites like Disneyland, people are saying "not until fall," you simply can't sell ads to a section like that.

Bridal? Special sections there face similar problems. You can't sell ads about honeymoon destinations.

Graduations? Small high schools will do the best they can, so non-daily papers won't hurt so much. But larger daily papers, if they have had grads specials in the past? Not right now.

Now, to classifieds.

They're off for several reasons.

One is that, to the degree newspapers still have a help wanted section, there's not a lot of people hiring right now. This is hitting all papers alike, from big regional dailies down to community weeklies.

Another is hitting from small community dailies on down.

Nobody's holding garage sales right now, in what should be prime season in the southern tier of the U.S. And, at small dailies and nondailies, at this time of the year, ordinarily that might make up a fair chunk of the classys.

There are a few other areas that have also been hit on the classys page, but that's the biggest I can think of.

The ancillary?

Obits, and similar.

Obits are hurting to a degree because public burials aren't happening right now. Because of that, especially at larger papers that charge by the word or by the column inch? I'm venturing a 10 percent drop there. Obits are shortening and some are moving more toward extended death notices.

On the other side of the spectrum, many non-dailies still don't charge for births, engagements and weddings. But some do. Certainly, small dailies do, and so do mid-sized ones. (I'm surprised large dailies haven't started this. Surely there's a few Buffett cigar butts there.)

Kids are still being born. (That may be different nine months from now, of course.)

But, weddings are on hold right now, because ... where do you have them? where is the honeymoon going to be? Etc.

1619 Project: The Pulitzers slouch toward Gomorrah

The only reason I can figure that the 1619 Project won a Pulitzer, despite both scads of historical incorrectness AND crappy editorial oversight at the New York Slimes, as I blogged about earlier, is virtue signaling.

Like Obama winning the Nobel Piss Prize, it seems to be virtue signaling. Hannah Jones, Jake Silverstein et al won because of who they're not.

The real Ida B. Wells, who got a special Pulitzer citation, is eminently deserving. Nikole Hannah Jones, who has the Twitter slugline of Ida Bae Wells? Not so much.

There is a bit of silver lining or two. The award was under commentary, which means OPINION, for Jones' opening essay in the project.

On the third hand, commentary should still be factually based, and this is not, and it still carries the stains of the whole project, because it serves as a framing device.

Alden Capital wants to be saved from itself and from its hypocrisy, schadenfreude and petard-hoisting

Ben Smith, formerly of ButtFeet and now the New York Times, notes that Alden Capital head Heath Freeman wants Facebook and Google to pay it more for the news they buy from it.

There's several problems here, per the second line of the header.

Above all with the Denver Post, anybody who knows anything about the media, about Alden Capital and how the Venn diagrams of "Alden" plus "media ownership" and "Alden" plus "news writing" are nowhere near the same, know that Alden really is producing almost no news. That's because, even though its newspapers are generally profitable, it's cut them to the bone and beyond, even worse than Craphouse (excuse me, New Gannett), and only to milk them because other things owned by Alden suck. So, that's the petard hoisting.

The hypocrisy is, of course, that were Alden to get paid more, it wouldn't reinvest it in its newspapers. See above.

The schadenfreude is the Alden connection to how newspapers got here in the first place.

In the middle 1990s, when the Internet started looming on the horizon, major papers and the AP started wondering how this might affect them. Well, the AP board of directors decided that the "TV model" showed that advertising would be fine and no online subscriptions needed. This, of course, ignored that pay cable channels existed already then and had for at least 15 years before that.

Now, here's the specifics of the schadenfreude.

Dean Singleton was chair of the board of AP at the time.

Deano, as I like to call him, as many know, owned Media News, or Media Snooze, an early "Chainsaw Al" guy. More on that in a moment. Media Snooze, as part of its growth + woes, became part of Digital First Media, or as it's known here, Dead Fucking Media. The whole conglomerate became part of Alden.

There's your schadenfreude.

So, go fuck yourself, Heath.

And, the additional bit of hypocrisy? "Chainsaw Al" Deano criticizing Alden almost exactly a year ago.