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By Charles Apple
Once upon a time, newspapers were the first, best source of news for the public.
In many cities, people had a choice of newspapers. Some arrived first thing in the morning. Some were delivered in the afternoon — just in time for dad to get home from work, plop into his easy chair and peruse the previous day’s box scores.
That’s not the case any more. Newspapers have seen an alarming shrinkage of their revenue, their resources, their staff and their readership.
And while smaller, local papers are hit especially hard by this, it is by no means limited to certain areas. This is a nationwide problem.
It would be easy to blame shrinking newspaper revenues on the movement of readers and advertisers to online platforms. But in truth, it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Newspapers made a lot of their money on classified advertising — think help-wanted ads, real estate ads and so on — and on the multiple full pages of ads retail outlets would buy. These paid the salaries for many reporters and editors — and, yes, in some cases made wealthy people out of publishers and owners.
Newspapers have succeeded in gaining a larger share of the digital ad market. But digital ads pay a fraction of what print ads used to bring in. Advertising revenue — upon which the industry was built — has dropped by more than 80% since its peak in 2005.
The result has been a total collapse of newspapers as a business and the companies that own them.
The number of people employed in newspaper newsrooms has shrunk nearly 60% over the past 17 years. This means fewer reporters, fewer photographers and fewer editors. This means less coverage of local issues, businesses and sports. In some cases, it means a paper might reduce its print schedule to only three or four issues a week.
In some cases, newspaper groups have laid off editors and designers and sent news production duties to regional centers or “hubs,” where papers are assembled by staffers who don’t live or work in the communities where their papers are located. Some newspapers have even outsourced this work to centers outside the U.S.
“There’s one obvious lesson to be drawn from the collapse” of the newspaper industry: “that a public service industry can be lost when subjected to overwhelming financial pressures,” writes Radford University journalism professor Bill Kovarik in his textbook, “Revolutions in Communication.”
“At some point, people will pay for the content they love,” continues Kovarik. “But then, what does that say about journalism? The popularity of the profession has gone down, and few people today would see journalists as knights of the press, as they did a century ago.
“Journalists have always been the gadflies of their communities, and perhaps as unwelcome today as in the days of William Cobbett or Joseph Pulitzer.”
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The State of Newspapers: 2025 Edition – The Spokesman-Review
