September, 2007
Books, schools, and newspapers are become too much neglected, and of consequence the rising generation will be great sufferers thereby if these necessary things, which tend to learning, are not more encouraged.
—Isaiah Thomas, publisher and printing historian, 1780
Some quick statistics…
First data point: Between the end of World War II and 1980, the total number of daily newspapers in the
Second data point: Combined circulations of all the daily newspapers in the
Third data point: Advertising revenues in American dailies were $32.3 billion in 1990. They climbed to $48.7 billion in 2000, and then settled back to an estimated $45 billion or so in 2006.
In short, the newspaper business has experienced an 11 percent decline in the number of dailies, a 16 percent decline in circulation, and a 47 percent increase in advertising revenue since 1990. The consolidation and readership trends were identifiable well before 1990, however.
This all raises a kind of “Where’s Waldo?” question, with the Internet playing the role of Waldo.
If reduction in the number of daily newspapers dates back to 1980… if newspaper circulations stopped growing in the ’60s… and if newspaper ad revenues are relatively steady despite consolidation and the challenge of maintaining readership… how much of the change is attributable to the Internet and how much to other factors? What exactly do the trends reflect?
We might observe, as Isaiah Thomas did in 1780, that newspapers “are become too much neglected”—that fewer papers are published today than 25 years ago and that fewer people buy them. We can also observe that newspaper publishers have raised rates and CPMs more or less in the teeth of the audience trends.
But we can’t really say that the Internet, which didn’t have a major presence in American media until the mid-1990s, is the causative force behind any of these newspaper trends. For sure, it’s been a compounding factor—given the Web’s brisk growth in the past five or six years, it would be nuts to think otherwise. Nevertheless, the Internet didn’t create conditions that date back to the ’80s in the case of newspaper consolidation and to the ’60s in the case of circulation decline.
It may not be a coincidence that the fall-off in the number of daily newspapers coincides with the widespread emergence of cable television in the 1980s, and that the circulation of daily newspapers peaked at a time when broadcast television was beginning to attain unassailable reach—as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post learned the hard way when they tried to compete toe-to-toe with TV.
Apparently, when they’re given a choice, Americans “like to watch,” as Chauncey Gardner put it. In other words, we seem to spend increasingly more time in front of screens than we spend with paper. This isn’t necessarily because we believe there’s less intrinsic value in print. We may simply accept the news from whatever device we’re already sitting in front of—TVs in our living rooms and bedrooms, and computers in our offices and laps.
Which is a shame, because reading a newspaper—even a bad one—provides a broader, more insightful, and deeper view of the news than anything a TV network, commercial radio station, or Web site is likely to serve up. It’s a richer experience, but you have to make time for it… and the screen is already there, a passive choice.
So, to recap. When television established itself as the medium of dominant reach, newspaper circulation stopped growing. When cable TV took off, the number of newspapers began to shrink. And well before the Internet became popular, newspaper readership began to decline. It obviously wasn’t the Internet that caused these phenomena—they predate the Internet.
It’s undeniable that the emergence of the Internet is a disruptive force in the newspaper business. But looking at the numbers and the dates, we can’t help wondering whether the Net is a cause of publishers’ troubles—or the effect of Americans’ increasing willingness to follow the easiest path to information.
We’ll let the question hang.