Josh Shear

I can't imagine that you've missed the news about the state of the newspaper industry. If you have, go spend three days reading about it, and talk to me when you've left the corner you've been rocking in.

Colorado's oldest paper, The Rocky Mountain News – which was actually launched in the Kansas Territory, before Colorado existed – has dedicated its Web site to the paper's shuttering weeks ago.

Photo of empty Post-Intelligencer box
by Brian M. Westbrook. Used with permission.

Washington's oldest paper, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, stopped print publication last week but is thriving online, to the point where you would have to actually know there was once a print edition.

The Christian Science Monitor will go to primarily online in April (they'll print a weekend edition, and have some other print offerings for subscribers, but nothing you can buy on the stands on a daily basis).

Gannett, which owns USA Today and a hundred-plus other newspapers across the country, has announced new furloughs as we move to the second quarter of 2009.

With all this going on, CNN wants to know what newspaper readers are going to do.

It's all felt very close, considering I once was a newspaper editor and reporter, before moving on to spend two years in grad school bitching about the decline of local news in newspapers (that was the unofficial name of my program).

And now I work for a Web site that's affiliated with a newspaper (they're owned by the same parent, but operated independently).

Operating independently, we don't take a direct hit when something happens in the newspaper industry. We're more like the person on the corner when the SUV slams into the hatchback, hoping we're standing just far enough back to avoid flying steel.

I'll be honest, it's been tough watching newspapers go down, but to some extent, the ivory tower in me is saying, "I told you so." But this week...well, this week, one of the newspapers in our chain announced it will go online only this summer. Another is planning to publish three days a week come June.

The newspaper chain my company is associated with announced a company-wide series of 10-day furloughs, apparently including my site's affiliate, The Post-Standard.

Some anonymous commenters are flat-out saying that production problems with this morning's paper may have been sabotage in the wake of the furlough news.

For the record, I very much doubt that.

Some people are still trying to save newspapers as printed products, but I've moved onto the fence. While I still enjoy kicking back with a Sunday paper and a cup (or three) of coffee, but let's face it, Clay Shirky gets a few things right.

Printing presses are expensive to buy, build, and run. Newsprint costs fluctuate, but overall, rise steadily. The price of distribution rises and falls with gas prices, which, as a whole, are going up, even if there are peaks and valleys.

I'm more interested in saving journalism than necessarily the printed product. I will always prefer reading longer pieces on paper, but with shrinking newsholes, we're getting shorter pieces overall anyway.

I have some ideas for making sure journalism survives – and that journalists thrive – but it seems like printed newspapers have spent a lot of time avoiding change.

And now, that avoidance is hitting really close to home. I'm hoping my colleagues hang in there, because I enjoy working with them, they're good people, and many of them are among the best in the country at what they do. Good luck, folks. I hope there's light at the end of this tunnel.