T wo longstanding New York City area newspapers, including one immortalized in "The Sopranos," are vanishing from newsstands , leaving Jersey City without printed news as media struggle against nationwide headwinds. Across the river from New York, the fate of New Jersey's Star-Ledger -- read by fictional mob boss Tony Soprano -- and The Jersey Journal is leaving locals without a physical paper and some journalists, paperboys and printers without jobs.
In the thick of Journal Square, named for the daily founded in , "Jersey Journal" in giant red letters adorns the building that once housed the newsroom, long since displaced.
With 17 employees and fewer than 15, copies sold daily, The Jersey Journal could not withstand the body blow that was the closure of the printworks it shared with The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest daily, which goes all-digital this weekend. The newspaper, which featured in the iconic New Jersey mafia TV series, won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in for a series of articles on the political upheavals of then-governor Jim McGreevey.
But the scoops didn't save the daily, as sales plummeted and the paper went through several rounds of painful buyouts. With the switch to all-digital, even its editorial board will be abolished, announced one of its members, Tom Moran.
The decline of the local press has been a slow, painful death across the United States. According to the latest report from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, more than one-third of newspapers -- 3, in all -- have gone out of print since They've been victims of declining readership and the consolidation of titles into a handful of corporate masters. Split-ticket voting tends to decline. Incumbents are reelected more often.
