Plenary delivers grim news about newspapers

By Rebecca Perlow
NLGJA Reporter Staff Writer

“Give us something to live for!” one member of the audience called out to Slate editor Jack Shafer after a particularly grim assessment of the current situation of daily newspapers.

“You wish,” Shafer responded, laughing.

Daily newspapers are dying a “slow, but profitable” death, according to panel members at the breakfast plenary “Death Watch: Will Newspapers Stop the Presses?” As many readers turn to the Internet, iPods, and cable television to get their news, overall circulation has plummeted. The availability of zoned editions, color printing and personal ads is doing little to stem the tide.

Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, suggested several possible reasons for declining readership including fewer human interest stories, cluttered page layouts and headline puns that “were so clever, no one could understand them.”

“We can blame cable TV or the Internet or Wall Street but we’re mostly doing it to our selves,” Rosenhause said.

Rosenhause and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel responded to circulation trends by focusing on local and state news, resulting in an increase in readership.

Andres Cavelier, multimedia editor of El Nuevo Herald, also spoke about news companies looking at the way they charge for the use of text, photos and other news canon on internet search engines like Google.

Cavelier described the relationship between English and Spanish-speaking news dailies as being in a “honeymoon phase,” but anticipates the latter falling into the same trends as the former as Spanish-speaking news sites online come into more demand.

“I think newspapers are going to be there but they’re going to be a completely different product from what we know now,” Cavalier said.