The decline of newspapers is an example and means of which to understand and observe the changing values of a culture. Whether newspapers are declining in popularity is region dependent. Data supports that in the U.S and Europe popularity and sales are wavering. In these regions, industry is facing slumping ad sales, the loss of much classified advertising, and precipitous drops in circulation. The U.S. saw the loss of an average of two newspapers per week between late 2019 and May 2022, leaving an estimated 70 million people in places that are already news deserts and areas that are in high risk of becoming so. Prior to that steep decline, newspapers' weekday circulation had fallen 7% and Sunday circulation 4% in the United States, their greatest declines since 2010. If the trend continues, a third of newspapers will be lost by 2025, according to a 2022 study published by Northwestern University.
To survive, newspapers are considering combining and other options, although the outcome of such partnerships has been criticized. Despite these problems, newspaper companies with significant brand value and which have published their work online have had a significant rise in viewership. The decline of newspapers has various adverse consequences, in particular at the local level. Research has linked closures of newspapers to declines in civic engagement of citizens, increases in government waste, and increases in political polarization. The decline of local news has also been linked to the increased nationalization of local elections.
Causes for decline
The newspaper industry has always been cyclical, and the industry has weathered previous troughs. Television's arrival in the 1950s began the decline of newspapers as most people's source of daily news. But the explosion of the Internet in the 1990s increased the range of media choices available to the average reader while further cutting into newspapers' dominance as the source of news. Television and the Internet both bring news to the consumer faster and in a more visual style than newspapers, which are constrained by their physical format and their physical manufacturing and distribution. Competing mediums also offer advertisers moving images and sound. And the Internet search function allows advertisers to tailor their pitch to readers who have revealed what they are seeking—an enormous advantage.
The Internet has also gone a step further than television in eroding the advertising income of newspapers, as — unlike broadcast media — it proves a convenient vehicle for classified advertising, particularly in categories such as jobs, vehicles, and real estate. Free services like Craigslist have decimated the classified advertising departments of newspapers, some of which depended on classifieds for 70% of their ad revenue. Research has shown that Craigslist cost the newspaper industry $5.4 billion from 2000 to 2007, and that changes on the classified side of newspaper business led to an increase in subscription prices, a decrease in display advertising rates, and impacted the online strategy of some newspapers. At the same time, newspapers have been pinched by consolidation of large department stores, which once accounted for substantial advertising sums.
Press baron Rupert Murdoch once described the profits flowing from his stable of newspapers as "rivers of gold", but several years later said, "sometimes rivers dry up." "Simply put", wrote The Buffalo News owner Warren Buffett, "if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed."
As their revenues have been squeezed, newspapers have also been increasingly assailed by other media taking away not only their readers but their principal sources of profit. Many of these 'new media' are not saddled with expensive union contracts, printing presses, delivery fleets and overhead built over decades. Many of these competitors are simply 'aggregators' of news, often derived from print sources, but without print media's capital-intensive overhead. One estimate put the percentage of online news derived from newspapers at 80%.