By Darren Johnson
Campus News
I think I can call it — newspaper newsstand sales are officially dead.
This hadn’t really hit home for me when journalism friends recently sent me links about the last newsstand in a part of New York City closing or recent Pew research indicating the overwhelming majority (83%!!!) of people do not choose to pay for news.
But yesterday, for the first time in years, my wife and I decided to do a staycation of sorts in our part of Upstate New York and go to the Saratoga Springs pools.
We first went to the Market 32 in nearby Wilton to get some ice, Cheetos and such, and my goal was to get a newspaper to read for the pool lounging experience (I’ve already read the latest issue of Campus News!).
I needed a paid-circulation paper. Not the typical local freebie shopper paper I can read in two minutes. But something substantial.
I’d accept an Albany Times Union, but also a New York Times, and, even though it’s stilted, I like The New York Post, and have a lot of interest in New York City matters.
However, at Market 32, like most grocery stores, the paid newspaper rack was in a shadowy corner, so it was out of sight and out of mind, and I therefore wasn’t reminded to grab one before checking out.
No problem. We were heading to 7-Eleven next for Big Gulps. They must have newspapers! I used to get a coffee, buttered roll and a Newsday every day at 7-Eleven when I lived on Long Island. But, no, the clerk in Wilton told me they haven’t sold newspapers in three years.
OK, there was a gas station mart across the street, between the Burger King and the Taco Bell. They must have newspapers.
I go in, but none are visible. I ask the clerk — they had a few hidden behind the counter, with the tobacco and lottery scratch offs. I guess newspapers are now a vice. I felt like I was asking for a nudie magazine.
They had a TU, a Post and one other I couldn’t discern. Maybe it was a super-thin Saratogian, the daily “ghost” newspaper owned by corporate overlords who’d gutted it over the past decade. I went with the Post. They had a photo on the cover of an alleged drug addict on the street inserting a hypodermic needle into his neck. I also find the New York City mayor’s race very interesting.
I’d been in denial about shrinking newsstand sales since taking over my hometown paper, The Journal & Press, six years ago. The Pew study is right — only a tiny percentage of you will pay for news nowadays.
I used to blame myself — maybe that cover story I picked about the local XYZ is boring. How can it compete against a cover featuring a crazed heroin addict?
But it’s not that the local papers are boring — it’s that people now perceive them as boring.
Look at this Sling commercial — how they show a paper carrier getting the papers thrown back at him. No one wants the printed paper in this ad. That’s the messaging Big Tech keeps repeating:
The stories in The Journal & Press are pretty much the same as they always have been — Dairy Princesses, Class D championships, new bridges and such — but maybe it’s social media that makes people want more than that now. People now want more of a dopamine hit than a photo of a goat at the county fair.
And then there’s a general feeling of petty lawlessness — as many people steal newspapers from a paid-circulation stand as actually go to the counter to pay for the paper. That’s probably why the gas station I went to has the papers hidden behind the nicotine packs and rolling papers.
The daily papers like The Post and The Times, with more sensational stories, do move copies (combined, they have about a million print circulation any given Sunday), but we can’t duplicate that at the local level. We don’t have that level of drama, at least not very often.
And when there is drama, the national news groups swoop in, outdoing the local press and then moving on.
For example, a big local fire from last month. By the time it made the cover of our print paper, it was old news that the bigger outlets had already had a field day with, and our small-town issue did poorly on newsstands.
So this is why we mostly celebrate columnists in the local paper. The people still buying it usually do so because they like some of our habit-forming content and the talented people creating it.
That, or like I mentioned in this recent column, people keep subscribing because they want to see how this all ends! I wish I knew!
Darren Johnson is a Journalism professor who owns the regional student paper Campus News and a hyper-local hometown paper, The Journal & Press. Reach him at editor@cccnews.info.
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