Newspaper Publishers Face Very Different and Much More Immediate Threats than Book Publishers

The business news has been very painful for newspapers lately. A piece we saw a couple of days ago says both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are going to cut back sharply on their arts coverage. The advertising simply isn’t there to support it.

And recently before that, we read a piece suggesting that perhaps newspapers should have just ignored the whole digital thing (a frighteningly obtuse suggestion) and then right afterwards a Times story documenting the collapse of advertising dollars available for print which pretty much obviates the “just skip digital” idea. (One wonders if the people advocating that solution are not aware that overall ad budgets are reviewed by all advertisers regularly and the budgets are routinely reallocated to put more into digital and less into print! This is not a “secret” trend.)