Decline of newspapers
The decline of newspapers in the 21st century consists of the closure of many traditional newspapers and a decline in the number of professional journalists. Meanwhile, a small number of newspapers with significant brand recognition have seen a significant rise in viewership of their online publications.
In the U.S. and Europe, newspapers are facing declining advertisement sales, the loss of much classified advertising, and precipitous drops in circulation. The U.S. saw the loss of an average of two newspapers per week between late 2019 and May 2022, leaving an estimated 70 million people in places that are already news deserts and areas that are in high risk of becoming so. Prior to that steep decline, newspapers' weekday circulation had fallen 7% and Sunday circulation 4% in the United States, their greatest declines since 2010.
To survive, newspapers are considering combining and other options, although the outcome of such partnerships has been criticized.
The decline of newspapers has various adverse consequences, in particular at the local level. For example, research has linked closures of newspapers to declines in civic engagement of citizens, increases in government waste, and increases in political polarization. The decline of local news has also been linked to the increased nationalization of local elections.
Causes
The newspaper industry has always been cyclical, and the industry has weathered previous troughs. Television's growth in the 1950s began the decline of newspapers as most people's source of daily news. But the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s increased the range of media choices available to the average reader while further cutting into newspapers' dominance as the source of news. Television and the Internet both bring news to the consumer faster and in a more visual style than newspapers, which are constrained by their physical format and their physical manufacturing and distribution. Competing mediums also offer advertisers moving images and sound. And the Internet search function allows advertisers to tailor their pitch to readers who have revealed what they are seeking—an enormous advantage.The Internet has also gone a step further than television in eroding the advertising income of newspapers, as — unlike broadcast media—it proves a convenient vehicle for classified advertising, particularly in categories such as jobs, vehicles, and real estate. Free services like Craigslist have decimated the classified advertising departments of newspapers, some of which depended on classifieds for 70% of their ad revenue. Research has shown that Craigslist cost the newspaper industry $5.4 billion from 2000 to 2007, and that changes on the classified side of newspaper business led to an increase in subscription prices, a decrease in display advertising rates, and impacted the online strategy of some newspapers. At the same time, newspapers have been pinched by consolidation of large department stores, which once accounted for substantial advertising sums.
Conversely, political scientist Robert D. Putnam found in Bowling Alone that Americans who watched television news were more likely to read a daily newspaper rather than less, that network television news viewership in the 1990s was falling faster than newspaper circulation, that cable news channels and news websites were drawing upon a declining segment of the population that regularly followed the news rather than expanding its size, and that the decline of news readership and viewership was attributable instead to generational differences of interest in news between the Greatest Generation and Silent Generation versus Baby boomers and Generation X.
Press baron Rupert Murdoch once described the profits flowing from his stable of newspapers as "rivers of gold", but several years later said, "sometimes rivers dry up." "Simply put", wrote The Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett, "if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed."
As their revenues have been squeezed, newspapers have also been increasingly assailed by other media taking away not only their readers but their principal sources of profit. Many of these 'new media' are not saddled with expensive union contracts, printing presses, delivery fleets and overhead built over decades. Many of these competitors are simply 'aggregators' of news, often derived from print sources, but without print media's capital-intensive overhead. One estimate put the percentage of online news derived from newspapers at 80%.
"Newspapers are doing the reporting in this country," observed John S. Carroll, editor of the Los Angeles Times for five years. "Google and Yahoo! aren't those people putting reporters on the street in any number. Blogs cannot afford it." Many newspapers also suffer from the broad trend toward "fragmentation" of all media—in which small numbers of large media outlets attempting to serve substantial portions of the population are replaced by an abundance of smaller and more specialized organizations, often aiming only to serve specific interest groups. So-called narrowcasting has splintered audiences into smaller and smaller slivers. But newspapers have not been alone in this: the rise of cable television and satellite television at the expense of network television in countries such as the United States and United Kingdom is another example of this fragmentation.
With social media sites overtaking TV as a source for news for young people, news organisations have become increasingly reliant on social media platforms for generating traffic. A report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism described how a 'second wave of disruption' had hit news organisations, with publishers such as The Economist having to employ large social media teams to optimise their posts and maximise traffic.
Performance in the market (2000–present)
United States
From 2005 to 2021, about 2,200 American local print newspapers closed. From 2008 to 2020, the number of American newspaper journalists fell by more than half.Since the beginning of 2009, the United States has seen a number of major metropolitan dailies shuttered or drastically pruned after no buyers emerged, including the Rocky Mountain News, closed in February, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reduced to a bare-bones Internet operation. The San Francisco Chronicle narrowly averted closure when employees made steep concessions. In Detroit, both newspapers, Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, slashed home delivery to three days a week, while prodding readers to visit the newspapers' Internet sites on other days. In Tucson, Arizona, the state's oldest newspaper, the Tucson Citizen, said it would cease publishing on March 21, 2009, when parent Gannett Company failed to find a buyer.
A number of other large, financially troubled newspapers are seeking buyers. One of the few large dailies finding a buyer is The San Diego Union-Tribune, which agreed to be sold to a private equity firm for what The Wall Street Journal called "a rock-bottom price" of less than $50 million—essentially a real estate purchase. The Sun-Times Media Group, publisher of the eponymous bankrupt newspaper, fielded a meager $5 million cash bid, plus assumption of debt, for assets last claimed worth $310 million.
Large newspaper chains filing bankruptcy as of February 2009 include the Tribune Company, the Journal Register Company, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, Sun-Times Media Group and Freedom Communications.
Some newspaper chains that have purchased other papers have seen stock values plummet. McClatchy, the nation's third-largest newspaper company, was the only bidder on the Knight Ridder chain of newspapers in 2005. Since its $6.5 billion Knight Ridder purchase, McClatchy's stock has lost more than 98% of its value. McClatchy subsequently announced large layoffs and executive pay cuts, as its shares fell into penny stock territory.
Other newspaper company valuations have been similarly punished: the stocks of Gannett Company, Lee Enterprises and Media General traded at less than two dollars per share by March 2009, with The Washington Post Company's stock faring better than most, thanks to diversification into educational training programs — and away from publishing. Similarly, UK-based Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, increased earnings in 2008 despite a drop in newspaper profits, thanks to diversification away from publishing.
By March 2018, it was acknowledged that the digital circulation for major newspapers was declining as well, leading to speculation that the entire newspaper industry in the United States was dying off. Circulation for once promising online news sites such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox declined in 2017 and 2018 as well. In June 2018, a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed a 9% decline in digital circulation of newspapers during the year 2017, suggesting that revenue from newspapers online could not offset the decline in print circulation.
The deterioration in the United States newspaper market led senator Ben Cardin to introduce a bill in March 2009 allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofit corporations with an array of tax breaks. The Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits similar to public broadcasting companies, barring them from making political endorsements.
A 2015 report from the Brookings Institution shows that the number of newspapers per hundred million population fell from 1,200 to 400 in 2014. Over that same period, circulation per capita declined from 35 percent in the mid-1940s to under 15 percent. The number of newspaper journalists has decreased from 43,000 in 1978 to 33,000 in 2015. Other traditional news media have also suffered. Since 1980, the television networks have lost half their audience for evening newscasts; the audience for radio news has shrunk by 40%.