Newspapers’ freefall blow to democracy?

Newspapers are reeling over slumping ad sales, loss of classified advertising that provided 70% of their income and precipitous drops in circulation.

Newspapers have axed 20% of its journalists since 2001 in a desperate attempt to stay solvent. The BJ went from 250 in the newsroom in 1996 to about 60 today. That's a 76% reduction of staff.

Both television and the Internet bring news to the consumer faster and in a more visual style than newspapers. 

The Internet is convenient for classified advertising, which is up to 70% of many newspapers’ ad revenue. Craigslist alone cost newspapers $5.4 billion from 2000-2007.

What Rupert Murdoch once called "rivers of gold" has become a treacherous trickle.

Newspapers that folded, filed for bankruptcy, sold at rock-bottom prices, dropped the print version for an Internet replica or reduced the days of home delivery:

Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Tucson Citizen, San Diega Union-Tribune, Tribune Company, Journal Register Company, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Sun-Times Media Group,  Freedom Communications, Albuquerque Tribune,  Baltimore Examiner, Cincinnati Post, Halifax Daily News, Honolulu Advertiser, Kentucky Post, 

King County Journal,  San Juan Star, South Idaho Press, Union City Register-Tribune. 

Since its $6.5 billion Knight-Ridder purchase, McClatchy's stock has lost more than 98% of its value. That’s down to an astounding 2 cents on the dollar.

Ironically, Amazon.com founder, billionaire Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington Post and smaller newspapers for $250 million. He helped kill the goose that laid the golden egg, then bought the carcass for peanuts.

To read the entire article about the horrendous decline of newspapers, which America’s Founding Fathers saw as so critical to democracy that they created the First Amendment, click on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers

Without newspapers investigating politicians, there’s no shotgun-toting farmer to keep the fox from destroying the hens, which in this case is a euphemism for democracy.