Publishers and journalists today face worrisome issues, such as the decline in newspaper readership and the failure of many papers to attract younger readers. However, other problems persist as newspapers continue to converge with the Internet and grapple with the future of digital news.

Readership Declines in the United States

The decline in daily newspaper readership actually began during the Great Depression with the rise of radio. Between 1931 and 1939, six hundred newspapers ceased operation. Another circulation crisis occurred from the late 1960s through the 1970s with the rise in network television viewing and greater competition from suburban weeklies. In addition, with an increasing number of women working full-time outside the home, newspapers could no longer consistently count on one of their core readership groups.

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, U.S. newspaper circulation dropped again, this time by more than 25 percent.44 In the face of such steep circulation and readership declines, however, overall audiences did start growing again thanks to online readers, and Pew’s State of the News Media 2013 report saw reasons for optimism:

Companies have started to experiment in a big way with a variety of new revenue streams and major organizational changes. Some of the bright opportunities—such as offering social marketing services to local businesses—are ventures too new to be measured yet industry-wide. They show signs of stabilizing revenue.

Digital pay plans are being adopted at 450 of the country’s 1,380 dailies and appear to be working not just at The New York Times but also at small and mid-sized papers. Twinned with print subscription and single-copy price increases, the digital paywall movement has circulation revenues holding steady or rising. Together with the other new revenue streams, these added circulation revenues are rebalancing the industry’s portfolio from its historic over-dependence on advertising.45

Remarkably, while the United States continues to experience declines in newspaper readership and advertising dollars, many other nations—where Internet news is still emerging—have experienced increases. For example, the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) reported that between 2003 and 2009, there was an 8.8 percent growth in newspaper readership worldwide, mostly concentrated in Asia, Africa, and South America.46 In 2013, WAN reported that between 2008 and 2013, “newspaper circulation dropped by 13 per cent in North America but rose 9.8 per cent in Asia,” while ad revenue “declined by 42.1 per cent in North America but rose by 6.2 per cent in Asia.”47 In 2014, WAN reported that “around 2.5 billion people” worldwide read newspapers in print and about 800 million read them in digital forms. While digital ad sales continue to grow for newspapers worldwide, this still represents a small percentage of print news revenue. According to WAN, “Globally, 93 per cent of all newspaper revenues continue to come from print.”48

Going Local: How Small and Campus Papers Retain Readers

Despite the doomsday headlines and predictions about the future of newspapers, it is important to note, as Pew’s State of the News Media 2010 report observed, that the problems of the newspaper business “are not uniform across the industry.” In fact, according to the report, “Small dailies and community weeklies, with the exception of some that are badly positioned or badly managed,” still do better than many “big-city papers.”49 That report back in 2010 also suggested that smaller papers in smaller communities remain “the dominant source for local information and the place for local merchants to advertise.”50

Smaller newspapers continue to do better today for several reasons. First, small towns and cities often don’t have local TV stations, big-city magazines, or numerous radio stations competing against newspapers for ad space. This means that smaller papers are more likely to retain their revenue from local advertisers. Second, whether they are tiny weekly papers serving small towns or campus newspapers serving university towns, such papers have a loyal and steady base of readers who cannot get information on their small communities from any other source. In fact, many college newspaper editors report that the most popular feature in their papers is the police report: It serves as a kind of local gossip, listing the names of students busted over the weekend for underage drinking or public intoxication.

Finally, because smaller newspapers tend to be more consensus-oriented than conflict-driven in their approach to news, these papers usually do not see the big dips in ad revenue that may occur when editors tackle complex or controversial topics that are divisive. For example, when a major regional newspaper does an investigative series on local auto dealers for poor service or shady business practices, those dealers—for a while—can cancel advertising that the paper sorely needs. While local papers fill in the gaps left by large mainstream papers and other news media sources, they still face some of the same challenges as large papers and must continue to adapt to retain readers and advertisers.

Blogs Challenge Newspapers’ Authority Online

The rise of blogs in the late 1990s brought amateurs into the realm of professional journalism. It was an awkward meeting. As National Press Club president Doug Harbrecht said to conservative blogger Matt Drudge in 1998 while introducing him to the press club’s members, “There aren’t many in this hallowed room who consider you a journalist. Real journalists . . . pride themselves on getting it first and right; they get to the bottom of the story, they bend over backwards to get the other side. Journalism means being painstakingly thorough, even-handed, and fair.”51 Harbrecht’s suggestion, of course, was that untrained bloggers weren’t as scrupulous as professionally trained journalists. In the following decade, though, as blogs like Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, The Dish: Biased and Balanced (http://dish.andrewsullivan.com), and Talking Points Memo gained credibility and a large readership, traditional journalism slowly began to try blogging, allowing some reporters to write a blog in addition to their regular newspaper, television, or radio work. Some newspapers, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, even hired journalists to blog exclusively for their Web sites.

By 2005, the wary relationship between journalism and blogging began to change. Blogging became less a journalistic sideline and more a viable main feature. Established journalists left major news organizations to begin new careers in the blogosphere. For example, in 2007, top journalists John Harris and Jim VandeHei left the Washington Post to launch Politico, a national blog (and, secondarily, a local newspaper) about Capitol Hill politics. Another breakthrough moment occurred when the Talking Points Memo blog, headed by Joshua Micah Marshall, won a George Polk Award for legal reporting in 2008. Explaining his view of blogging, Marshall has said, “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”52 Increasingly, because of qualified journalists moving online, Pew reports that sites that started out as opinionated blogs have grown into legitimate news venues:

Digital players have exploded onto the news scene, bringing technological know-how and new money and luring top talent. BuzzFeed, once scoffed at for content viewed as “click bait,” now has a news staff of 170, including top names like Pulitzer Prize–winner Mark Schoofs, and is the kind of place that ProPublica’s Paul Steiger says he would want to work at if he were young again. Mashable now has a news staff of 70 and enticed former New York Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts to become its chief content officer. And in January of this year [2014], Ezra Klein left the Washington Post for Vox Media, which will become the new home for his explanatory journalism concept. Many of these companies are already successful digital brands—built around an innate understanding of technology—and are using revenues from other parts of the operation to get the news operations off the ground.53

What distinguishes the best online news from so many opinion blogs still out there is the reliance on old-fashioned journalism—calling on reporters to interview people as sources, to look at documents, and to find evidence to support the story, whether it is in print or online.

Convergence: Newspapers Struggle in the Move to Digital

Because of their local monopoly status, many newspapers were slower than other media to confront the challenges of the Internet. But faced with competition from the 24/7 news cycle on cable, newspapers responded by developing online versions of their papers. While some observers think newspapers are on the verge of extinction as the digital age eclipses the print era, the industry is no dinosaur. In fact, the history of communication demonstrates that older mass media have always adapted; so far, books, newspapers, and magazines have adjusted to the radio, television, and movie industries. And with nearly fifteen hundred North American daily papers going online in 2010, newspapers are solving one of the industry’s major economic headaches: the cost of newsprint. After salaries, paper is the industry’s largest expense, typically accounting for more than 25 percent of a newspaper’s total cost.

Online newspapers are truly taking advantage of the flexibility the Internet offers. Because space is not an issue online, newspapers can post stories and readers’ letters that they aren’t able to print in the paper edition. They can also run longer stories with more in-depth coverage, as well as offer immediate updates to breaking news. Also, most stories appear online before they appear in print; they can be posted at any time and updated several times a day.

Among the valuable resources that online newspapers offer are hyperlinks to Web sites that relate to stories and that link news reports to an archive of related articles. Free of charge or for a modest fee, a reader can search the newspaper’s database from home and investigate the entire sequence and history of an ongoing story, such as a trial, over the course of several months. Taking advantage of the Internet’s multimedia capabilities, online newspapers offer readers the ability to stream audio and video files—everything from presidential news conferences to local sports highlights to original video footage from a storm disaster. Today’s online newspapers offer readers a dynamic, rather than a static, resource.

However, these advances have yet to pay off. Online ads in the United States accounted for about 13 percent of a newspaper’s advertising in 2010—up about 3 percent from 2009. So newspapers, even in decline, are still heavily dependent on print ads. But this trend does not seem likely to sustain papers for long. Ad revenue for newspaper print ads in 2009 declined 25 to 35 percent at many newspapers.54 To jump-start online revenue streams, more than four hundred daily newspapers collaborated with Yahoo! (the number-one portal to newspapers online) in 2006 to begin an advertising venture that aimed to increase papers’ online revenue by 10 to 20 percent. By summer 2010, with the addition of the large Gannett chain, Yahoo! had nearly nine hundred papers in the ad partnership. During an eighteen-month period in 2009–10, the Yahoo! consortium sold over thirty thousand online ad campaigns in local markets, with most revenue shared 50/50 between Yahoo! and its partner papers.55

By 2014, online ad sales for newspapers accounted for about 17 percent of U.S. newspapers’ advertising revenue, suggesting that online sales on average had risen just 1 percent a year since 2010. The Newspaper Association of America reported that print ad sales in 2013 had declined another 8.6 percent, which represented a loss of $1.6 billion. In terms of digital advertising—the revenue stream that could provide the foundation for a new business model for newspapers—sales were up just 1.5 percent in 2013. As the Nieman Journalism Lab noted: “In 2014, American newspapers still [got] 83 percent of their advertising revenue from print.”56

One of the business mistakes that most newspaper executives made near the beginning of the Internet age was giving away online content for free. Whereas their print versions always had two revenue streams—ads and subscriptions—newspaper executives weren’t convinced that online revenue would amount to much, so they used their online version as an advertisement for the printed paper. Since those early years, most newspapers are now trying to establish a paywall—charging a fee for online access to news content—but customers used to getting online content for free have shunned most online subscriptions. One paper that did charge early for online content was the Wall Street Journal, which pioneered one of the few successful paywalls in the digital era. In fact, the Journal, helped by the public’s interest in the economic crisis and 400,000 paid subscriptions to its online service, replaced USA Today as the nation’s most widely circulated newspaper in 2009. In early 2011, a University of Missouri study found 46 percent of papers with circulations under 25,000 said they charged for some online content, while only 24 percent of papers with more than 25,000 in circulation charged for content.57

An interesting case in the paywall experiments is the New York Times. In 2005, the paper began charging online readers for access to its editorials and columns, but the rest of the site was free. This system lasted only until 2007. But starting in March 2011, the paper added a paywall—a metered system that was mostly aimed at getting the New York Times’ most loyal online readers, rather than the casual online reader, to pay for online access. Under this paywall system, print subscribers would continue to get Web access free. Online-only subscribers could opt for one of three plans: $15 per month for Web and smartphone access, $20 per month for Web and tablet access, or $35 per month for an “all-you-can-eat” plan that would allow access to all the Times platforms. In its first few weeks of operation, the paper gained more than 100,000 new subscribers and lost only about 15 percent of traffic from the days of free Web access—a more positive scenario than the 50 percent loss in online traffic some observers had predicted. And in early 2013, the Times reported 668,000 paid subscribers to all its various digital options.58

In the years that followed, over 150 newspapers, including many small ones, launched various paywalls, many of them based on the New York Times’ metered model, trying to reverse years of giving away their print content online for free. Larger metro dailies, including the Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Los Angeles Times, have also started their own paywalls and metered models. But in 2014, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported on a number of studies and a report on Gannett’s experiments with its various paywalls and concluded: “When you announce a paywall, you get a one-time boost from people who are willing to pay. But it plateaus. And maybe some of those subscribers eventually drop off. It’s not a growth model that does anything like replace the ongoing decline in print advertising revenue—which continues to decline somewhere in the high single digits every year.”59

New Models for Journalism

In response to the challenges newspapers face, a number of journalists, economists, and citizens are calling for new business models—with more potential than paywalls—for combating newspapers’ decline. One avenue is developing new business ventures, such as the online-only papers begun by former print reporters. Started by former Washington Post reporters in 2007, Politico is a successful example. Another idea is for wealthy universities like Harvard and Yale to buy and support papers, thereby better insulating their public service and watchdog operations from the high profit expectations of the marketplace. Another possibility might be to get Internet companies involved. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 is one example. Earlier, Google—worried that a decline in the quality of journalism meant fewer sites on which to post ads and earn online revenue—pledged $5 million to news foundations and companies to encourage innovation in digital journalism. Wealthy Internet companies like Microsoft and Google could expand into the news business and start producing content for both online and print papers. In fact, in March 2010, Yahoo! began hiring reporters to increase the presence of its online news site. The company hired reporters from Politico, BusinessWeek, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo, among others.

Additional ideas are coming from universities (where journalism school enrollments are actually increasing). For example, the dean of Columbia University’s Journalism School (started once upon a time with money bequeathed by nineteenth-century newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer) commissioned a study from Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, Columbia journalism professor and media scholar. Their report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” focused on lost circulation, advertising revenue, and news jobs, and aimed to create a strategy for reporting that would hold public and government officials accountable.60 After all, citizens in democracies require basic access to reports, data, and documentation in order to be well informed. Here is an overview of their recommendations, some of which have already been implemented:

As the journalism industry continues to reinvent itself and tries new avenues to ensure its future, not every “great” idea will work out. Some of the immediate backlash to Downie and Schudson’s report raised questions about the government becoming involved with traditionally independent news media. What is important, however, is that newspapers continue to experiment with new ideas and business models so that they can adapt and even thrive in the Internet age. (For more on the challenges facing journalism, see Chapter 14.)

Alternative Voices

The combination of the online news surge and traditional newsroom cutbacks has led to a phenomenon known as citizen journalism, or citizen media (or community journalism for those projects in which the participants might not be citizens). As a grassroots movement, citizen journalism refers to people—activist amateurs and concerned citizens, not professional journalists—who use the Internet and blogs to disseminate news and information. In fact, with steep declines in newsroom staffs, many professional news media organizations—like CNN’s iReport and many regional newspapers—are increasingly trying to corral citizen journalists as an inexpensive way to make up for the journalists lost to newsroom downsizing.

Back in 2008, one study reported that more than one thousand community-based Web sites were in operation, posting citizen stories about local government, police, and city development.61 By 2013, as many as fifteen hundred such sites were running. Some sites simply aggregate video footage from YouTube, mostly from natural disasters and crises, such as the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing in 2013. These disaster and crisis videos represent by far the biggest contribution to news by amateurs. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 40 percent of the “most watched news videos” over a fifteen-month period in 2011 and 2012 “came directly from citizens.”62

Beyond the citizen model, another Pew study in 2013 identified 170 specific nonprofit news organizations “with minimal staffs and modest budgets” that “range from the nationally known [like the investigative site ProPublica] to the hyperlocal” that are trying to compensate for the loss of close to 20,000 commercial newsroom jobs over the last decade.63 In 2014, Pew studied 438 of these newer digital sites: “Of the 402 outlets that identified a business model, slightly more than half (204) are nonprofits compared with 196 that are commercial entities. In recent years, the nonprofit model has attracted a significant amount of foundation funding for news gathering.” In its State of the News Media 2014 report, Pew “estimated that roughly $150 million in philanthropy now goes to journalism annually. Some of that is used as seed money for digital nonprofit news organizations: 61% of the nonprofit news organizations surveyed by Pew Research began with a large start-up grant.” Pew noted that the “goal for these organizations is ultimately finding a sustainable business model less reliant on big giving.”64

Most journalists and many citizens want to see more professional models of journalism develop in the digital age so that people can decrease their reliance on unedited video footage and untrained amateurs as key sources for news. While many community-based sites and ordinary citizen reporters do not have the resources to provide the kind of regional news coverage that local newspapers once provided, there is still a lot of hope for community journalism moving forward. Some new digital sites have adopted what could be called a “pro-am” model for journalism, in which amateurs are trained by professionals. This practice is already followed at many universities, where students are trained by former and current journalists and then collaborate on print, broadcast, and online news projects with local news media.