Customer Reviews

-30-: The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper

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This book was a disappointment. It suffers from the failings of a collection of short articles written for different purposes by different authors. There is a good deal of repetition and many of the analyses are superficial. The LA Times / Chicago Tribune fiasco is treated in detail but I didn't learn a lot I hadn't seen in press coverage of the acquisition and its sequelae.

The notable exception is the superb essay from 1995 by Elizabeth M. Neiva. She discusses how the introduction of photocomposition reduced the production costs for newspapers and resulted in significantly increased profits. Then the IRS began appraising family owned newspapers on what a potential buyer might pay for the paper rather than book value. The heirs of many publishers found they could not pay the inheritance taxes and sold the papers to publicly held firms. This essay is currently available on the web.

In an industry with declining revenues the only response to Wall Street's pressure for "growth" for a publicly held firm has been to cut costs year after year.

The treatment of possible solutions to our current problems was not convincing. I would like to have read about nonprofit journalism models such as the Poynter Institute's St. Petersburg Times and the new ProPublica project.

The age of the urban newspaper is over - and reflects a vast change in news communications delivery, charted here in 30, which tells of the urban American newspaper's decline. Technological change, management policy, and changing social values have helped erode the print newspaper's meaning and also reflects changing audience and newspaper worker needs. Author Charles Madigan is a former UPS International correspondent and columnist for the Chicago Tribune: his insider's focus considers everything from underlying profit concerns to social changing, making THIRTY a strong pick for both college-level holdings strong in media studies and general-interest libraries alike.

Everyone working or interested in the change of the newspaper industry should read this. A personal and thoughtful journey through today's media landscape.