Growing up with a father who worked in the newspaper
industry, it’s difficult for me to remember a time when I
did not have an awareness that the industry was in a
decline. It certainly impacted our family, with the
newspaper where my father worked phasing out annual
holiday bonuses; a sizeable check grew smaller, was
replaced by a turkey and eventually dwindled to
nothing. In our family of seven that holiday bonus made a
big difference. My father’s work schedule became
more erratic as the paper was bought and sold, with new
owners implementing different cost saving measures from
layoffs to increasing my father’s workload and changing
working hours from day to night.
A 1998 Washington Post article examining the history of
newspapers cites 1910 as the peak of the industry, with 2,600
dailies saturating the U.S. market. The business of consolidation
drove that number down to 1,763 by 1942, with the emergence
of radio and particularly television as alternative news sources
continuing to reduce the number of daily newspapers.
(Nelson, 1998).
Children today might be surprised to learn that there used to be
morning and evening editions of newspapers. The evening news
on network television arguably cut down the number of evening
editions from 1,429 evening papers in 1946 to 846 evening papers
by 1998. But the impact of digital competition in the past twenty
years has been more intense - a 62% drop in advertising revenue
between 2008 and 2018 reflecting a $23.5 billion loss
(Grieco, 2020).
Compounding the current challenges in the newspaper
industry, as with all things, is COVID-19. The pandemic
has not been kind to the newspaper industry, with 83 papers
folding in the past two years. Currently 2,000 counties across
the United States don’t have a daily newspaper. To clarify, the
United States has around 3,143 county-type entities, meaning
over 63% are without daily news. These areas, known as
“news deserts,” typically have demographics reflecting
less educated and lower income residents (Adgate, 2021).
So when addressing the question of whether the print industry is
dying I do not regard it as purely a function of the digital age.
But it is important to distinguish the newspaper industry, which
was long a primary channel for journalism, from journalism
itself - the decay of print as a medium doesn’t necessarily
mean the death of journalism - or does it?
Newsrooms are shrinking. Current investment in news
organization staffing is down 57% from where it was in
2004, and 12% of that dip occurred in the last two years
(Pew Research Center, 2020). Fewer reporters means less
meaningful reporting, especially the type of time-intensive
investigative reporting that can expose political corruption
and social injustice.
There are still major newspapers out there, like The Wall
Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York
Times who have seen their online subscriptions grow as
their paper subscriptions have fallen, but we are a far cry
from where we were over the last century with the breadth
of news being covered by a robust network of journalists in
many of our communities. There are bloggers, vloggers,
influencers and citizen journalists in the mediascape who
might be seen as filling the gap left by the death of the
small community newsroom, but we have lost something
in terms of expertise, commitment and accountability.
Newspapers without a doubt dominated the Industrial Age in
regards to disseminating news. What is dominating the digital
age? To some extent, social media. A recent survey through
the Pew Research Center Journalism Project showed that
Americans are getting more of their news through social media
than ever before, with 36% of respondents sharing Facebook
as a frequent news source and 23% citing YouTube
(Shearer & Mitchell, 2021). Some of the news is content shared
from worthy news organizations, but it can be difficult for
the average consumer to recognize misinformation and
propaganda pushed out through sources that look legit, but are
not. So our news landscape gets muddled, and the truth is
somethingthat can be easily manipulated, intensifying cultural
and political divisions in our country.
I gift my father with a subscription to the paper version of
The Wall Street Journal, which is expensive, but he really
enjoys reading the physical paper with his morning coffee.
Perhaps it takes him back to his years of checking paper
layouts while the building shook around him with the roar
of the printing press, which no doubt contributed to later
hearing loss. As a child I remember seeing the massive piles
of bundled newspapers being loaded into large trucks and vans
idling outside of the press building, waiting to inundate our
community with local news. But the printed newspaper,
once a commonplace item to the American consumer,
is now more of a luxury item.
REFERNCES
Adgate, B. (2021). Newspapers Have Been Struggling And Then Came The Pandemic. Forbes.
Retrieved January 15, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2021/08/20/newspapers
-have-been-struggling-and-then-came-the-pandemic/?sh=56c76fcd12e6
Grieco, E. (2020, February 14). Fast facts about the newspaper industry’s financial struggles as
McClatchy files for bankruptcy. Pew Research Center.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/14/fast-facts-about-the-newspaper-industrys-financial-struggles/
Lepore, J. (2019). Does Journalism Have a Future? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine
/2019/01/28/does-journalism-have-a-future
Nelson, H. (1998, February 11). A HISTORY OF NEWSPAPER: GUTENBERG’S PRESS
STARTED A REVOLUTION. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com
/archive/1998/02/11/a-history-of-newspaper-gutenbergs-press-started-a-revolution
/2e95875c-313e-4b5c-9807-8bcb031257ad/
PEW RESEARCH CENTER. (2021, June 29). Trends and Facts on Newspapers | State of the News Media.
Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/
Shearer, E., & Mitchell, A. (2021, January 12). News Use Across Social Media Platforms in 2020. Pew
Research Center’s Journalism Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2021/01/12/news-
use-across-social-media-platforms-in-2020/
As a child, one of my best friends had a parent that worked in the news industry. As we grew, they became not only the journalist but often, to make ends meet, they took up additional jobs at the newspaper where they worked. It never dawned on me until after reading your article how scary that time in their career must have been. As an outsider to their life, I thought the extra work was for fun and so exciting. During sleepovers during this time of transition for them, we even go to load up in the back of the station wagon (sans seats or seatbelts - it makes me cringe as a mother now) to deliver newspapers to the front steps. Your father’s experience was certainly not unique, as the traditionalism in that industry has seen a significant shift. I appreciate how you point out that journalism is not a word that is tied strictly to print. There are many trustworthy journalists adding value to our society, but as you pointed out, that value is harder to find and easily manipulated. Even someone educated on tactics people use online to spread falsities, I have to search and verify information daily. I’m eager to see how journalism evolves and what emerges from this digital news divide. I’m with your Dad in loving a physical newspaper - except I don’t have a child willing to pay my subscription fee quite yet, so I often get my news from digital means. Maybe, just maybe, we (or at least your Dad and I) will be lucky enough that others feel this way, and the physical newspaper will make a comeback. Wishful thinking!
ReplyDeleteI don't think I started getting interested reading the news until early high school and during that time, I was getting it almost exclusively from online sources. When I think of how I interacted with physical new papers, the main memory that comes to mind is sifting through the Sunday paper for the comics that were printed in color. Perhaps that makes me a product of my generation, coming of age at the same time mobilization of media and news came about. It's interesting to note how a global advancement in technology can have so many affects, one of them being the near destruction of a profession. Journalists now operate in a much different way that requires them to have media-focused knowledge that may not have been required 20 years ago. While many traditional institutions of news still exist, its workers still have to adapt to the modern way of distributing information. Making blogs, videos, even posting to a story on a social media account are all means of sending out data to the general public that previous generations of journalists did not have to account for in order for them to do their jobs. Being able to show advanced media literacy is key to job security in the modern news world.
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