Nothing News
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you are probably aware of the precipitous decline of print news circulation over the past decade, almost universally attributed to the ubiquitous and free news any joe with a mobile phone can access nowadays. Here’s a rather stunning visual.
Some unsurprising trends: the Los Angeles Times is an absolute horrorshow. Not shown: the Boston Globe disappearing off the bottom of this chart, in a two decade decline from 521,000 in 1990 to 264,105 this year.
Sad to see the LA Times doing such a dreadful business – I think they have the best online design of any major news outlet. Certainly better than my local paper, and a lot less blood-red-awful than that other media loser, the lowest-rated cable news provider, CNN.
I love McSweeney’s defiant response:
Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there.
…just $55.
