Weekend Blood Letting in Area Newspapers, Journal Could be Next

By on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 7:29 am

The parent company of the Trentonian filed for bankruptcy over the weekend, as well as the Philadelphia Inquirer, the third oldest daily paper in the country. Both papers serve south Jersey. Jersey City’s Jersey Journal warned earlier this month that the paper would also be facing closure as early as April.

The Journal has been struggling in recent years. In 2005, in an effort to attract more readers, the paper went from a standard broadsheet format to a tabloid size. At the time, the move was seen as risky but necessary.

Print news has been hit from all angles in recent years. Classified ads, the one time bread and butter of the newspaper industry has largely been replaced by internet sites like Craigslist. Subscriber bases have declined too as readers began consuming news online free of charge. Meanwhile, the internet has also increased competition allowing citizen journalists access to the same readers as professional news organizations.

One such project is the Jersey City Independent, an online only news site focusing on Jersey City. The Independent provides the online news coverage the Journal should have been providing all along.

The Journal does not have its own website, instead publishing off of its parent company’s brand NJ.com. One of the problems with NJ.com is that news articles on the site disappear from the internet after just two weeks, depriving the site of archival ad revenue. On the other hand, online publications remain available since their inception.

NJ.com has experimented with more modern formats, such as the blogs Hudson County Now and Hoboken Now. Largely though these efforts in the online realm have been, in internet parlance, a fail. For instance, Hoboken Now competes directly with independent news site Hoboken411. Hoboken411 produces vast quantities of content and maintains a loyal reader base on a minimal budget; NJ.com blogs on the other hand consist of multiple staff members and are not robust enough to conform to standards of internet publications. Standard internet practice includes linking to multiple sources, providing readers a richer experience; instead, NJ.com most often links to NJ.com, limiting the usefulness of the site.

Meanwhile, the Hudson County weekly paper, The Hudson Reporter has reinvigorated its web presence with a site redesign. The free paper best known for collecting unread on city stoops has refreshed its web portal to provide timely news and regular updates as well as accept reader content.

The Jersey Journal may not exist come April, but the Jersey City residents will not be wanting for news. The very reasons the Journal faces an uphill battle– competition from the internet– has made for better information available to readers. If the Journal cannot survive, its only because someone built a better mousetrap.






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