Knight Ridder is No. 1, not No. 3, Potts says

Mark Potts who writes a blog he calls "Recovering Journalist" is taking issue with the choice of Editor & Publisher Joe Strupp's picks for the top 10 stories in the news media in 2006, Here's his dig:

Strupp's pick for the top development affecting the newspaper industry in 2006: "The Web Comes of Age." Uh, it did? In 2006? Nope. Certainly not in the rest of the wired (and wireless) world, where the Web came of age years ago—and has been pounding newspapers ever since. And it's not even true in the newspaper industry, where most of the Web trends that Strupp heralds (24/7 Web newsrooms, substantial gains in online audiences) have been happening for years. I'd argue that there are a LOT of things newspapers still aren't doing on the Web (Citizens' media? Social networking? Google mapping? Liberal use of video?), but that's not the problem with Strupp's No. 1 pick.

No, the problem with Strupp's list is that the biggest story of the year in the newspaper industry is that everybody in the industry seems finally to have figured out that the industry is in very serious trouble, and the upheaval that's resulted from that realization in the past year has been nothing short of massive. Hints of that upheaval, in fact, are all over Strupp's list: The dissolution of Knight Ridder, continued job cuts, Tribune Co.'s problems—all of those are symptoms of the greater story, which is an overall decline in the industry's fortunes.

Click on the headline to go to Potts blog. See Stroup's list in post below.