It’s not too late to register for Blog Nashville, a premier bloggercon this weekend at Nashville’s Belmont University. The schedule is here.

Of particular interest, if I may be so bold, is Saturday’s series of sessions including one on Military Blogging, hosted by blogger Robin Burk who writes on such matters at Winds of Change and her own blog, Random Probabilities. Panelists are Robin, Bill Roggio of The Fourth Rail, Tim Schmoyer of Sisyphean Musings, USMC _Vet of WordUnheard and (ahem) myself.

There are many other worthy sessions in the day also, and some great parties planned. If you can make it, it sounds like a good weekend. And registration and participation are free! Can’t beat that deal!

One of my mottos is that it’s never too late to jump on a bandwagon or, failing that, get in front of a parade. I’m not sue whether the latest round on newspaper-bashing is a bandwagon or a parade, but here I go anyway.

For some time now media analysts have said that the newspaper bizness is in trouble. What brought it up this time around was in early April General Motors pulled its corporate-bought ads from the Los Angeles Times. A GM spokesman said the reason was the LAT’s “factual errors and misrepresentations” about GM products in the paper’s auto coverage.

No word on when the company will lift the ban and restore its ad campaign through the paper, but the pull is costing the LAT a zillion dollars in lost revenue; I’ve read estimates that the loss could reach the tens of millions of dollars. But consider what could make the ban permanent, not from continuing corporate retribution but from financial imperatives:

1. The only ads pulled were the ones GM itself paid for, not ads paid for by LA-based auto dealers. Those guys must advertise in the paper no matter what. So GM products are still being advertised in the LAT.

2. May is the first full month of the paper missing GM’s ads. What if sales figures for this month favorably compare to May of 2004, when GM was buying ads? Of more accurately, what if the difference between the months is not significant enough in lost revenue to GM to justify throwing money back into the paper? Why would GM resume advertising for June? And if June continued the trend, July? How many such months would it take for GM’s green-eyeshade folks to conclude there is no reason ever to resume corporate ads in the LAT?

The nation’s newspapers are overall suffering from declining circulation, and the LA Times’ decline is about double the average - more than six percent. The Dallas Morning News is off nine percent weekdays and a whopping 13 percent Sundays - a figure acknowledged by the paper due partly to the fact that (wait for it!) the paper had “overstated circulation figures,” which is journalism-speak for “lied through their teeth.” What to do, what to do?

Long stuck in a slow decline, U.S. newspapers face the prospect of an accelerated drop in circulation. The slide is fueling an urgent industry discussion about whether the trend can be halted in a digital age and is forcing newspaper executives to rethink their traditional strategies.

Rather than simply trying to halt the decline, which can be done readily through discounts and promotions, they’re being forced to try to “manage” their circulation in new ways. Some publishers are deliberately cutting circulation in the hope of selling advertisers on the quality of their subscribers. Others are expanding into new markets to make up for losses in their core markets. Some are switching to a tabloid format or giving away papers to try to attract younger readers. Others are pouring money into television and radio advertising and expensive face-to-face sales pitches to potential subscribers.

There will at least be some short-term success from these efforts:

“If you’re willing to spend the money to buy circulation, you can pretty much make your circulation what you want it to be,” says John Morton, a newspaper-industry consultant.

But I think the growing pressures are against the industry. We are living well into the post-literate age, an age that began with the invention of the printing press in the early 1500s. But people born after about 1955 generally are the first denizens of the post-literate, or information age. What they hear and see is far more important than what they read. This generation reads primarily for recreation, when they read at all. Whatever they need to know, they’ll get from television or the internet. After all, they have a satellite dish that pulls in 150 channels or so and broadband.

Of course, gaining information on the internet is mostly reading, but it’s reading with a big difference over news papers. Papers are static, the internet is dynamic. Papers offer pony-express style feedback. You have to write a letter to the editor and mail it snail mail and maybe later in the week it will appear in print, disparate in both time and space from the article you wrote about. Most papers accept emailed letters, but the lack of collocation and co-information with the original piece still pertains.

Basically, people today live and work in a horizontally-organized, non-linear (or “organic,” as the buzzword puts it) world but newspapers are linear and vertically organized relative to their consumers.

But I’ll not keep flogging the internet’s advantages over dailies, since that’s been done all over the place. Some attention needs to be paid to what going on inside the papers themselves. Gerard Van der Leun says that having recognized they are hemorrhaging,

… everything that is being done seems to open the vein wider.

You know this if you still take and are paying at least passing attention to your local newspaper. It has, you’ve probably noticed, become more colorful and jazzy in the last few years. It has gone from “Just give the news please” to “Here’s a lot of nifty color pictures, graphs, and charts and other PIX along with a fresh selection from our bottomless FONTS collection.” I call this the PIX & FONTS DAILY — a way of presenting something that is supposed to be a “paper on which is printed the news” as a dog’s dinner of “Graphics Gone Wild.” Pulling the news out of this … festival of visual white noise is becoming, really, far too much of a chore. And yet the papers, scared out of being themselves by television news, persist in trying to reinvent themselves as TV news that doesn’t move and has no sound.

The sections on pop culture have become popsier. The sections on the home have become homier. Large headlines have become larger, pull-quotes more numerous until they march across the page like some many infolet islands. If it has a comics sections more panels have come in and it has probably expanded to two pages jammed with gag strips but fewer continuing story strips. The front page, especially above the fold, has become not a quick scan of the important and interesting news of the day before, but a kind of carny display of fascinating featurettes you will find inside if you will only (”Please!”) take the time to read them.

Gerard quotes Glenn Reynolds (no link) as saying that to reverse the decline, papers should report “interesting news that people can’t get elsewhere.” But pray, what news might that be? Perhaps the only category of news that Americans can’t get elsewhere is in-depth, focused reportage from overseas. There are plenty of foreign papers and news organs of course, not to mention bloggers all over the world. They all make great reading, but it’s not the same as having an American living in the other country, reporting developments as an American.

But foreign correspondents are becoming rarer and rarer, supplanted by feeds from overseas agencies and “parachute” reporters, who fly into a country for specific, high-attention stories, then fly back home. The Edward R. Murrows of the news business are practically gone.

But that’s not all. Newspapers are nowadays first and foremost business organization who have to make revenue to stay afloat. That just a fact of free-market life in America and nothing can be done about it. But what papers have generally done because of it has, I think, negatively affected their circulation. I cited Matt Welch in my post about ambush journalism that America’s newspapers are catering almost exclusively to the well-to-do in search of advertising dollars, skewing their news coverage in order to achieve reader demographics that attract high-dollar advertisers. As the result,

“Daily newspapers have effectively dropped [coverage of] the bottom quintile or perhaps a third of the population,” wrote communications professor Robert McChesney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a chapter of the 2002 book Into the Buzzsaw.

Matt goes on to point out,

One hundred years ago, brawling urban dailies and the barons behind them understood their primary duty to be attracting and serving the maximum number of readers, period. Success was measured in circulation, not journalism awards or profit margins. Innovators such as William Randolph Hearst identified and created a market opportunity by appealing to workers and immigrants who aspired to join the middle class.

In 2003, publishers are far more concerned with making sure their readers are rich. The New York Times, for example, boasts to advertisers its readership “is almost three times as likely as the average U.S. adult to have a college or post-graduate degree, more than twice as likely to be professional/managerial and almost three times as likely to have a household income exceeding [US]$100,000.” Those robust demographics are nurtured by a series of discriminating editorial choices — special issues devoted to food, money, design, “The Sophisticated Traveller … Lives Well Lived,” and so on.

The skew is even more pronounced outside New York, where most daily newspapers are local monopolies that don’t share the Times’ journalistic aspirations. Sunday magazines, especially, are open-handed insults to the have-nots, with their landscape architecture spreads and write-ups of US$200 brunches. Internet sections come and go based on the tech-sector marketing climate of the moment (as opposed to the amount of online activity, which continues to boom). Murder victims in the ghetto are lucky to merit single paragraphs on B5, while affluent college kids struck by stray bullets are memorialized above the fold.

Matt details some success stories, though, so read his piece.