Why Newspapers Are Destined to Die

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Only Nostradamus could predict exactly what’s coming next (not really), but we can be certain that the newspapers we all love to hate don’t have much of a future. How can we know that? Well, for one thing, just look at these latest numbers from Gallup:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' confidence in two facets of the news media -- newspapers and television news -- has fallen to all-time low points. Just 16% of U.S. adults now say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers and 11% in television news. Both readings are down five percentage points since last year.

Many people have trouble believing that newspapers could go the way of the Dodo but apply those numbers anywhere else. Do you think a restaurant could survive if only 16% of their patrons thought the food was really good? How about a car repair shop where the number of customers that were sure they could get their cars fixed was that low? The only places that can be that universally hated and survive are part of the government, which admittedly, is a possibility.

It’s not hard to imagine Democrats helping out their pals in the media by subsidizing their hapless garbage because they believe it’s good to have them putting their propaganda out, but that would be likely to further reduce the public’s trust in the media. After all, how do you believe what a paper says about the government when they can only survive with government funding? How much confidence would you have in a scientific study showing that smoking is healthy for you founded by the American Tobacco Association? On top of that, given how unpopular newspapers are, Republicans would aggressively try to block, cut, or ideally end any funding that the media received. In other words, government funding might look like a lifeline, but ultimately it would be an anchor.

However, it’s worth asking; How did newspapers get into this position in the first place?

First of all, in the modern era, news has moved online. You can make a lot of money doing media online, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what newspapers used to make back in the day when everyone was buying a paper, there was almost no competition, and before competitors like Craigslist stole most of the classifieds market. This is a big problem because non-local reporting is extremely EXPENSIVE. It often requires paying reporters a big chunk of money, paying for their flights, hotels, and expenses to cover events that may not be all that exciting or make for a big story. It’s also time intensive, especially when you’re talking about things like legislation, technology, or health issues. So, how do you make that profitable? In many cases, you don’t, but you can cut all the way down to the bare bones and publish what are essentially rewritten press releases passed along by friendly operatives in addition to outrage bait. That is a formula that is, at least for the short term, getting some papers in the black – temporarily at least. Even that is going to turn out to be a short-term reprieve:

About one in four US newspapers, or almost 2,200 titles, have shuttered in the past 15 years, according to a University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Media report. Many of the remaining 6,700 publications have become what UNC calls “ghost newspapers”: shells of their former selves, stuffed with adverts and wire copy after years of gutting.

...Not everyone is a loser. The New York Times’s newsroom headcount is at an all-time high. Its stock ­valuation has quadrupled since 2016, and it has become a rare force in American journalism, growing to seven million digital subscribers. But this is more than four times the combined online paying readership of the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and all 100 newspapers owned by Gannett, the largest US print publisher by newspaper titles.

...The great recession of 2008 brought any lingering excess to a halt, for good. Advertising revenues for US newspapers plunged from $49bn in 2006 to $14bn in 2018, according to Pew Research.

Why did those revenues decline so fast? It was the Internet. Instead of a local paper dominating coverage in each city, there are a nearly unlimited number of competitors going toe-to-toe with the big boys online. How can they do that? Well, as I noted in my piece, “How Doritos Journalism Corrupted the News Business and is Wrecking America,” all those online entrepreneurs are operating under a completely different paradigm than the mainstream media did up until recently:

Well, the old paradigm people used to work under in the news business prior to social media coming of age was something closer to the combination of the slogan of the New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print” and Fox News’ “Fair and balanced.” In other words, a news source was expected to cover the most important news of the day in an accurate and unbiased way.

Did news sources fall short of that goal? Absolutely, but they did care about being accurate and at least giving people the impression that they were being fair.

My philosophy (at Right Wing News) was a little different. I certainly cared about getting the story right, but I wasn’t interested in giving people all the important news of the day for a simple reason. A lot of important news is boring and when your traffic is driven by social media, why bother writing a boring story no one is going to read? You can talk about the debt, the threat posed by North Korea, or write an in-depth analysis of the national highway system, and guess what? It’ll get zero traffic.

Know what did get traffic? Things that made people FEEL. Confirmation that they were right. Stories that made them say, “I relate to that guy, and I would have done the same thing in that controversial situation.” Stories that made them outraged. Many of these stories that did the best for us were not national news in the conventional sense. A dad beating some guy who molested his daughter to death, welfare recipients freaking out because they were told they had to work, or a sad father warning people after his son died of a drug overdose might be the sort of thing people are really interested in watching but is it really news you need to know to be informed?

Newspapers have decided, “If you can’t beat them, join them” and they’ve abandoned their old business model to copy the outrage peddlers online. Sure, they may have a little more real news and be better-known brands, but at a fundamental level, newspapers are just doing the same thing social media-driven websites pioneered in the middle of the last decade. It’s focused on anger, outrage, and posting whatever it takes to get the most clicks, which is a very different thing than just covering the news. In addition, unfortunately, in a world where people are increasingly demanding news that caters to their personal prejudices and preferences, that means becoming extremely partisan. The sort of audience that reads the New York Times or watches ABC doesn’t want fair, neutral, both sides, or to hear anything positive at all about conservatives, which again, runs contrary to everything the news is supposed to be about. If your paper doesn’t even have the option of saying the other side is right, then you’re not doing news, you’re doing propaganda.

That becomes a self-reinforcing problem. The conservatives and Republicans vilified in that propaganda, aren’t going to be giving you money. Even the liberals that like it realize it’s propaganda and it erodes their trust. They know you’re just telling them what they want to hear. However, if these outlets try to go back to the model of the “good old days,” chances are, their conservative audiences aren’t coming back, and their liberal audiences will abandon them.

So, what do they do? Well, they slowly, painfully, die. That’s what they do.

That may seem inconceivable, but it’s not. Horses and buggies used to be a popular mode of transportation, not just something you can do at Central Park in New York City. I still remember the Brother word processor I had in college. It worked off of floppy disks and I liked it. You can’t go buy one of those at Wal-Mart because computers made them obsolete. You remember the giant, heavy TVs that used to be around? I certainly do. I can remember hearing a local thrift shop saying that they didn’t even want them for free once flat screens became a thing because no one would buy them at any price.

Eventually, most of the mainstream media outlets out there are also going to prove to be something that people won’t buy at any cost and then, the question becomes, “What comes next?” A much more localized approach to news? A handful of surviving mega-papers? A group of billionaires getting together to fund the whole shebang? It’s hard to say, but if everyone, including the people in the industry, can’t figure out how it will survive long-term, that’s a good indication that it’s going to die.

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