Sunday, Feb. 26, 2023 was the last print day for three of the largest newspapers in Alabama.
The Alabama Media Group stopped printing The Birmingham News, Mobile’s Press-Register, and the The Huntsville Times. The end of the print era for the dead-tree editions of the newspapers had been announced in December. The newspaper group had already cut publishing the print edition of these newspapers to three times a week since 2012. The three have moved to all digital content.
All of the final editions had the same front page, with a letter from Editor-In-Chief Kelly Ann Scott and group President Tom Bates, thanking thanks the communities for their support these many years.
The Birmingham News was first published on March 14, 1888, by founder and managing editor Rufus N. Rhodes, who got the newspaper up and running with an $800 capital investment.
The Mobile Press-Register was founded in 1813, and is Alabama’s oldest newspaper. From 1997 to 2006, it was known as the Mobile Register.
The Huntsville Times was founded as the Huntsville Daily Times by Jacob Emory Pierce in 1910.
The number of print newspapers has dropped by more than 25% since 2005. The number of journalists working for print newspapers is down by 59%, since 2006, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
“Newspapers are continuing to vanish at a rapid rate. An average of more than two a week are disappearing. Since 2005, the country has lost more than a fourth of its newspapers (2,500) and is on track to lose a third by 2025. Even though the pandemic was not the catastrophic ‘extinction-level event’ some feared, the country lost more than 360 newspapers between the waning pre-pandemic months of late 2019 and the end of May 2022. All but 24 of those papers were weeklies, serving communities ranging in size from a few hundred people to tens of thousands. Most communities that lose a newspaper do not get a digital or print replacement. The country has 6,380 surviving papers: 1,230 dailies and 5,150 weeklies,” the report said last June.
Anchorage has a paper that should be out of business and could not survive unless money from the left was put in to keep it a float to print it far left slant on everything it puts out….(garbage in and garbage out)
Why not open up your own “truth outlet,” Charlie? There’s plenty of room to the right. Time’s a wasting!
It’s actually kind of startling that anyone still prints a newspaper anymore. Remember magazines? Phone books? Thing of the past.
Speaking of phone books. The yellow pages under Berry Company was a HUGE business. Information Technology of its day.
It’s not really a surprise that newspapers are obsolete except for a tiny few of us that like to read while eating breakfast. And that’s also because Jackie’s Place is one of the few restaurants that buys a “house” paper and other people will buy a paper too and then leave them.
So I don’t have to buy one myself.
Unfortunately, the crossword puzzle aficionados will pull a section out, fold the paper sheet into 1/8’s, do the crossword, and then leave it behind in its crumpled state. All to satisfy their ego showing to everyone else they were able to complete the puzzle.
So then its up to the rest of us to unwrap it if we want to finish the story on page 7.
Correction: Pages 7, 8, 9, and 10. You see the problem?
A long time ago when I lived in Anchorage, I used to go to Leroy’s for dinner, get a paper, and enjoy the whole experience.
Get a good diner meal for relatively low bucks, catch up on the news of the day, and blow off an evening.
If Leroy’s is still there I suppose you can do the same process with a cell phone, but it wouldn’t be the same.
Yes, Leroy’s is still there on the corner of Fireweed and C st..Years ago, I used to eat my Saturday morning breakfast (’74-75)before setting out for the day.. Right on the bus line.
Doing by a cell phone will never be the same. Cell phone print is not large enough to read.
Was at Leroy’s yesterday. Still a newspaper box by the door.
And they now have TV news on constantly (volume down)
The TV is always tuned to OAN (One America News) so it’s a MAGA cafe!
God Bless Leroys, established in 1964.
Darn. Maybe people don’t read anymore. In Alaska at least we need them to start our wood stove fires. Some people don’t have internet. What will they do?
Sad, but inevitable. I still enjoy the feel of holding the paper.
The mistake newspapers made was thinking they were in the newspaper business. A reasonable but incorrect assumption. They were in the information business. Many folded when unable to adapt to the new reality of digital and nationwide competition.
We will miss the whole process of reading our News papers ????
Still got the Dothan Penny Saver though.
Too bad it wasn’t the ADN, how much longer do we have to suffer?
There now is a terrible shortage of “fish wrappers” in Alabama now. At least the Alabama forests have been saved!
How many trees are now being saved through the increased demand for lithium and cobalt?
Likewise, I believe the supposed CO2 “problem” will be eliminated like the ozone hole problem was: Advancements in Technology.
Soon, we will be able to adjust our global climate by seeding the oceans with iron – recreating the primordial conditions for creating oxygen. Not too much though….because that is what would create gigantism as what occurred in the prehistoric era of the dinosaurs. Or use calcium carbonates to adjust the oceans Ph level – the erosion of the Himalayas being a good example of that.
Right now the Earth’s plates are in a historical state of slow oppositional movement (a scrum) – reducing the amount of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which has lead to global warming. Eventually the plates “break out” of the scrum causing worldwide catastrophic events as well as climate changes.
I am most personally concerned by the fact the Earths protective magnetic field is weakening. They say it will flip polarity soon…..
Once the polarity flips, the previously magnetically aligned rocks in the Earth’s floating crust suddenly want to magnetically drift in the opposite direction. This creates a metageophysic disruption in Earth’s climasphere. Have you ever heard about the Siberian Traps?
So thank God, or whoever you believe created the circumstances of our great fortune to have a wickedly hot innermost solid ball of iron and nickel. The inner core’s outer shell and its newly confirmed innermost sphere both are hot enough to be molten but are a solid iron-nickel alloy because the incredible pressure at the center of the Earth renders it a solid state.
It would be awesome if the furniture companies would stop polluting my mailbox w/ their print ad trash.
Talk to your postman. They’ll tell you that they’re working long hours and short handed and pain on the job and blah blah blah. All the while they’re incentivizing purveyors of trash advertising to send monstrous amounts of birdcage liner at unprofitable rates.
Print is dead, the postal system delivers parcels and not letters, and publishers of newsprint are hearing their own death rattle at every turn.
As a guy that went from being a paperboy in the 70’s to seeing the demise of newsprint in the post 2010 era it seems to me that this is a nature at work. Anybody got a fax machine anymore? Yeah… but they’re only using them as a printer. If it’s not digital, it belongs to yesterday. Newspapers are the new microfiche.
It’s amazing that the Binkley family up in Fairbanks wanted anything to do with the ADN. They bought it for a song, but why would an old Republican family want a Left-wing rag in their business portfolio? Tourism and radical, liberal politics don’t seem to be a good pairing. Or, are they?
Nobody spends their life savings on a trip to Alaska to see our mines, mills, and oilwells. The mines in SE have figured it out; you make those mines invisible to cruise ship passengers.
Comments are closed.