Newspapers are a fundamental part of how Americans consume their news. Or at least they used to be.
The fall in readership of print newspapers in the 21st century can be attributed to the popularity of television and online news, as supported by research and surveys.
Journalism.org reported in 2016 that only 20 percent of Americans often get their news from print newspapers, while 57 percent of Americans get their news from television and 38 percent get their news from social media, websites and apps. Let’s look back at the history of news organizations in America to find when this drop in popularity happened.
In 1690, Benjamin Harris published the first American newspaper in Boston, titled Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick(History.org, 2003). From their inception, newspapers like this one faced opposition. Four days after the first publication, English authorities put Harris’ newspaper out of business for his reporting on the English military.
Newspapers existed hundreds of years before television and internet came along. Print publications spent decades learning the dangers of censorship, how to report with integrity, and how to make tough decisions about what to publish before television and online news even existed.
In the 1920’s, the first real threat to newspapers arose in the form of radio broadcasts, so Americans no longer had to read to get their news. Even with radio news, Americans still valued reading a newspaper, so the popularity didn’t die off immediately.
Newspapers began to lose popularity more significantly with the invention of the television. In the 1970’s, television pushed newspapers aside when news broadcasts such as CBS Evening News anchored by Walter Cronkite became the dominant form of news American families consumed.
This gain in popularity of television news led to a gradual decline in readership of newspapers. Journalism.org reported that in 1970, 62.1 million weekly newspapers circulated in America each day. There was a steady decrease in circulation over the next 30 years with the rise in trust of television news, resulting in a daily circulation of 55.7 million print newspapers in 2000.
This decrease in circulation grew exponentially with the beginnings of the internet. Starting in the mid 2000’s people could now read their news online, meaning people no longer needed to pick up a stack of papers if they preferred to read their news. This resulted in the daily circulation of weekly papers to decrease over a few years to 40.7 million by 2013.
The trust in online news sources has only grown since 2013, as expressed by the continued decline in circulation of print newspapers. Journalism.org estimates 30.9 million weekly newspapers circulate daily in 2017. This 10 million readership drop in just four years illustrates how quickly Americans are now ditching print newspapers.
Douglas Struck, a journalism professor at Emerson College and a former reporter for print publications such as the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun for 30 years said the newspaper industry has been shrinking for the past decade.
“It’s hard not to notice when your industry starts to shrink,” Struck said. “As it has been shrinking for some decades to the point that 10 years ago, newspapers began doing severe layoffs and many newspapers did those layoffs in the form of buyouts.”
Struck said a buyout is when a newspaper cannot afford to maintain their staff, so they offer employees a sum of money for them to resign. In 2008, Struck took a buyout offer from the Washington Post.
“Circulation was going down and advertising revenue was going down and those two have been the financial foundation of the newspaper industry. As a result, newspapers have been shedding their newsroom staff for decades now,” Struck said.
The trend of newspaper layoffs can be observed at a national level. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in January 2008, approximately 340,000 people worked in the newspaper industry. By March 2016, this number has dropped to approximately 180,000 people, meaning 160,000 journalists lost their job in the newspaper industry over an eight year time period.
Struck said watching this decline in employment of the newspaper industry has been “incredibly discouraging” for him as a journalist.
“It’s been really discouraging to see your colleagues who love the business are forced, coerced, or chose to leave because the financial package they were offered encouraged them to leave. It was a morale draining time,” Struck said.
According to Struck, the layoffs taking place at newspapers has weaned in more recent years, due to some publications reaching a “rock bottom”.
The impact of print newspapers losing readership and rise of online news has affected how Americans read their news. Reader’s attention spans have dropped significantly over recent decades, as reported by Microsoft. In a recent study, they found the average adult attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in 2015.
The Columbia Journalism Review explained how this phenomenon affects how people read news in 2016 when they wrote, “Studies show that readers tend to skim and jump around online more than they do in print—not just within individual stories, but from page to page and site to site. Print provides a more linear, less distracting way of reading, which in turn increases comprehension.”
Print newspapers offer readers many benefits that online and television news sources cannot offer. News cannot be released out to print immediately after it happens, which leaves a lot of room for fact checking to happen before publication.
For television, social media, and news websites, it’s all but too easy to publicize news before it’s been verified. This leads to constant falsehoods being promoted to the public right after large news stories break on television and online.
New York Times journalist Farhad Manjoo wrote about this in March 2018, when he explained in an article his experience getting news from print newspapers exclusively for two months.
Manjoo wrote, “I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which isn’t true.”
There is still hope for print newspapers- their success is dependent on if they can evolve to capture new audiences’ attention.
In many ways newspapers have already started to change to try to keep people reading. Harvard Politics wrote that newspapers have begun revising their content into “bite sized packages” in an attempt to secure readership from younger audiences.
Scott Bowles, a former employee of USA Today laid off in 2014 said to Harvard Politics that his bosses told him to shorten story length and focus on topics trending online.
“We were told to make stories shorter [and] pay attention to what is hot on social media…We were writing about Justin Bieber in a way we never were before. We were covering things that only kids cared about and that was now driving news,” Bowles said.
Print newspapers have yet to find success in this tactic, yet news websites like Buzzfeed continue to grow in readership every month.
Buzzfeed is one of the most notable news outlets to successfully gain readership of millennials and generation z. On their website, Buzzfeed claims to have an audience of over 650 million people.
Buzzfeed news articles are kept concise and entertaining to read in order to appease the shortened attention span of the modern American. They regularly embed Tweets, Instagram posts, and Facebook statuses in their stories to fulfill the interest young adults have in social media.
Although very few print newspapers have tried this yet, perhaps a total redesign of their newspapers is what’s necessary to gain readers back. With the high volume of clicks Buzzfeed receives on a daily basis, maybe it’s time for print publications take a leaf out of Buzzfeed’s book.
Print newspapers have managed to stay afloat in recent years by developing websites where viewers can read articles online. This has proved successful for the major print newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, to name a few.
These websites often feature more articles online than in the print edition, while also featuring E-Editions of their print newspaper for paid subscribers. Subscribers can choose to only receive and E-Edition of the paper, or to also have a print edition mailed to their house in addition to the PDF of the newspaper.
In an era of constant innovation, it’s difficult to predict where print newspapers will be in a couple of decades. With the continuous decline of print newspaper readership, there isn’t a better time than now for innovation of print news.
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