Newspaper Industry Bloodbath Continues

This time it’s Gannett — which owns newspapers across the country — shedding 1,000 jobs.

This means a lot for us… as recently as 2005, Yale University found that newspapers were still Americans’ #2 source of information about the environment. So what explains the decline? Competition from electronic media is certainly part of the story — but Americans have lost a lot of faith in what they read, too. Here’s an interesting quote from Pew:

Two decades ago, just 16% Americans said they could believe little or nothing of what they read in their daily paper. In the most recent survey, that number tripled, to nearly 45%

Source: Pew Trends 2005

In fact, Americans’ trust in the news media has sagged so much that nature protection and pollution control experts now have more credibility when you communicate the the public directly. You have less credibility when you communicate to the public through the media.

On a personal note, let me just say this makes me very sad, and that’s probably part of the reason I focus so much attention on this. I learned to read by reading the newspaper. And ever since my first letter-to-the-editor got published, I knew that I wanted to change the world by spreading the word.

This Internet thing is pretty cool, too, but it’s not quite the same, is it?

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