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Josh Marshall:

It’s news to no one that physical, print newspapers are in the throes of a historic decline. But the numbers themselves really take your breath away when you see them. According to the Audit Bureau, daily circulation fell 10.6% year over year in the period between April to September.

Ad revenues are one thing; and they’re likely enough to be fatal to newspapers as the dominant mode of news distribution in the country. But that figures in economic trends of various sorts. But readership, while obviously intimately related, is a different sort of metric. I have many thoughts on this. But at the moment I’m not sure what to say other than those numbers take my breath away. A ten percent decline year over year is the rate of a mode of distribution going out of existence.

A few years ago I was on a panel discussion and the moderator asked us all how long newspapers distributed on newsprint would last in the United States.  My guess was 20 years: that is, the last newspaper in the country would shut its doors in 2025.

That’s now looking pretty optimistic: a lot of people these days seem to think that 2012 is more like it, and today’s news won’t do anything to change their minds.  At the same time, there are various ways you can look at that 10% drop, and one of them is simply that the recession has condensed several years of decline into a single year.  A $500 newspaper subscription is a prime candidate to get sliced out of the family budget when times are tough and news can be found everywhere.  So maybe all that’s happening is that a cohort of the least dedicated readers are leaving all at once, and when the recession starts to lift newspaper circulations will begin to stabilize a bit.  Or at least decline more slowly.

Maybe.  I’m not sure what I think anymore.  On the one hand, there’s a generational attachment to newspapers that just won’t go away as fast as people think.  (People routinely underestimate generational attachments.  But the fact is that they only truly go away when generations die out, and that takes a while.)  On the other hand, there really does seem to be a tipping point issue here: as circulations decline, and newspapers respond by cutting back staff, the quality of the product spirals down.  That’s a vicious cycle, and there’s a point at which the quality deteriorates so fast and so hard that even old newspaper diehards just don’t want to bother anymore.  I’m pretty far along the diehard continuum myself, but the deterioration of the LA Times is so obvious these days that even I’m not sure how much longer I really feel like paying for it.  We’ll see.

In any case, I guess I’ll stick with 2025 for now.  There may be small local papers around for longer than that, but no big city dailies.  New York will be the last to go, but in fifteen years newspapers will be a thing of the past even there.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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