Niche News Organizations Rise as Major News Organizations Die

Just when it seemed like it couldn't get any worse, more economic cutbacks continue to occur. This time the cutbacks are occurring in the newspaper business. One would think that in today's news rich world, newspapers would be thriving. The truth is that newspapers are actually in the worst condition financially that they have been in since the Great Depression. Like other industries, newspapers are trying to cut costs as fast as possible because they continue to lose revenue. Many of them figure that sticking to local news will be their best bet as opposed to national and international news. This basically means that lots of the Washington bureaus are being vacated.

Newspaper teams in Washington are shrinking very fast. Cox newspapers, the publisher of 17 total papers, advised that its Washington bureau would be closed as of April 1, 2009. This is another sign of the severity of this recession. Cox had approximately 30 people to cover the Bush administration in 2000. Other publications have already closed their Washington bureaus, and the ones that do continue their coverage on Washington have tremendously cut back on that coverage.

This has obviously affected hundreds of journalists as far as their jobs are concerned. The irony to it all is the fact that our country is in a time when journalistic coverage of the federal government matters the most. The good news for journalists is that they can turn to the Internet for work, but will likely have to settle for less pay than what they are used to, due to the fact that the Internet does not lack journalists or content producers. Internet coverage of news has a lot to do with the downturn in traditional newspaper sales. With other organizations pulling out of Washington there are a few that have been putting more reporters in Washington, like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, who combined have almost 100 people in Washington.

In light of all of these negative occurrences with newspaper organizations, there has been some growth in the area of niche publications. This makes a lot of sense for the fact that all major newspapers generally cover the same news. Also all of these major newspapers pretty much cost the same amount of money, so the fact that they all cover the same material doesn't cause the people to really have the desire to buy one newspaper over another. More narrowly focused organizations have a target audience and will thrive due to having dedicated readers of the specific topics that they cover.