Monday, March 4, 2019

Newspapers Shrink as Online Journalism Struggles to Fill the Gap

The recently announced voluntary buyout offer to 450 employees of the McClatchy newspaper chain. Almost half of them took up that offer. Not all were journalists or editors, but many were. Over all McClatchy has downsized by three and a half percent of its workforce. This underscores the dramatic decline in the nation’s print newspapers in recent decades. The numbers are staggering. Circulation nationally has been cut by nearly half, according to the Pew Research Center for Journalism and Media. At its peak in the early 1970’s of some 60 million print newspaper circulation has gone down to just over 30 million. Combined with a 23 percent drop in ad revenues for print newspapers has rapidly pushed newspapers to embrace a digital format in order to survive. That’s also the trend in California. Vic Bedoian reports from Fresno.