The Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down its presses last week after 146 years in operation, and moved it daily newspaper to a web-only format.
The New York Times is currently over one billion dollars in debt. With New York and the world’s economy still cowering under the specter of a prolonged recession, advertising rates just aren’t what they use to be.
Right here in Portland, the Press Herald is currently negotiating a deal with an investment group who have only offered what the paper calls a "bargain basement price" to take over Blethen Maine Newspaper’s operations.
This is clearly a challenging and uncertain time for traditional print newspapers. Even at a college newspaper like The Free Press, which does not rely solely on ad revenue to cover its production costs, a slowing economy has brought some budgetary realities into the newsroom.
We as a staff are proud of the product we produce on a weekly basis. It’s not perfect, we can’t always cover everything we would like, and more than a few typos have been known to slip through, but we feel that the newspaper acts as an important record of what happens at USM throughout the academic year.
It has come time for us to find more creative, cost-effective way to deliver the news to members of the USM community. Like other papers, we’ve tested internet-based news platforms, usmfreepress.org, a blogger.com site, and a Twitter feed, and we encourage you to follow us there.
In this web-centric time of ours, it’s easy to tune out when people start going on about their blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and so on. However, we believe that we must take every opportunity to carve out a web presence for ourselves.
Usmfreepress.org is the online home of The Free Press, here you can find all the stories from our weekly printed edition, plus some supplementary articles we can’t always find room to print. We encourage leaders to log in, comment on stories, and participate in our weekly polls, the result of which we use to refine our focus on what kind of stories we cover.
The Free Press Blotter is our staff blog. Don’t expect to find anything terribly newsy here, this is just where our staff of editors share their thoughts, insights, and lots of links to pictures of adorable animals and/or Onion articles. If you ever wanted a look into the gang of snarky miscreants that make up The Free Press, this would be the place to go.
The latest weapon in our arsenal of information is USMFreePress Twitter feed. We were initially skeptical of yet another social networking utility that allowed people to share mundane details of their lives, but recognized that it might be useful in delivering breaking news to our readers right from our cell phones.
As a senior looking for job prospects, I spend a lot of time wondering about the future of the news industry. I can’t imagine it’s going to look anything like the system I grew up with, and it can be scary to look into such a hazy tomorrow.
But I also count myself as kind of lucky. As a journalist at such a dynamic time, I have the chance to experiment with new ways of doing things, and the freedom and flexibility of a college newspaper makes it the perfect testing ground for these ideas.
So please, keep picking up the paper from our racks around campus, but if you want to get involved in the news process, give us feedback, alert us to breaking news, or just enjoy some YouTube videos with us, get online and keep The Free Press in mind. Thanks for reading, Matt Dodge
The Free Press Blotter (our blog)
Free Press Twitter
Facebook Page