For most of my career working for newspapers, management was focused on drawing younger readers. Editors warned that savvy newspapers had to draw in young adult readers because their present readers were going to die some day.
Such was the disdain of mid-level middle-aged managers for their elders. Of course, no news outfit wants its customers (and revenue) to wither and die, but many managers felt that they should not be content with finding replacement readers — established adults who have time to care about the world, as non-news readers matured — when they could be turning younger adults into lifelong newspaper readers.
That was the hope, anyway. How did it work? With the advent of Facebook and other social media giants, lot of papers went under.
Here’s a link for them all, and I’ll show a smaller list of one-time California rags.
Pittsburg Post-Dispatch, merged with the Daily Ledger on October 1, 1990
Burbank Daily Review (1948–1969)[22]
Byron Times
Weekly Butte Democrat (Oroville), 1859–1862
Chung Sai Yat Po (San Francisco, in Chinese)
Evening Outlook (Santa Monica)
Fortuna Advance (Fortuna) (existed in 1905)
The Golden Era (San Francisco)
Hispano América (San Francisco, in Spanish, 1917–1934)[27][28]
Hokubei Mainichi Newspaper (San Francisco, in Japanese)
Hollywood Citizen (1931–1970)[29]
Los Angeles Examiner (1903–1962)[30]
Los Angeles Express (1871–1931)
Los Angeles Herald Examiner (1962–1989)[31]
Los Angeles Herald-Express (1931–1962)[32]
Los Angeles Record (1895–1933)[33]
Los Angeles Saturday Night (1920–1934, illustrated weekly by Samuel Travers Clover)
Los Angeles Star / La Estrella de Los Ángeles (bilingual English/Spanish, 1851–1879)[34]
Nichi Bei Times (San Francisco, in Japanese)
Sacramento Union (1851–1994)[35]
San Diego Daily Journal (1944–1950)[36]
San Francisco Call (1856–1913)[37]
San Francisco Evening Bulletin (1929–1959)[38]
San Francisco Frontiers (1994–2002)[39]
The San Francisco News (1903–1959)[40]
La Sociedad (San Francisco, in Spanish, 1869–1895)[41]
Viet Mercury (San Jose, in Vietnamese)
La Voz de Méjico (San Francisco, in Spanish, 1862–1866)[42]
Other papers have stayed in business by downsizing their news hole. The result: Smaller pages, thinner editions.
There are, of course, exceptions. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal saw the potential in online subscribers and now are the top two papers circulation-wise in the country.
But there is good news in journo-land. Smart editors finally are seeing the value of senior readers. Oldsters have more disposable income. They care about the world. The Gray Lady has put a lot of manpower into covering “Longevity” because aging is universal. There was a “Longevity” section on a recent Sunday, with an oldish dressed-up dog on the cover. The paper runs frequent well-reported stories about living North of 65. You can teach old dogs news tricks.
Probably, editors are getting older too.
What about you? Where do you get your news?
Don’t be old alone. Subscribe to North of 65 and feel the love, dog.
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