What really killed newspapers
The internet, of course! But not for the reasons you think
The first commercial radio broadcast went on the air on Nov. 2, 1920, on KDKA in Pittsburgh, with results of that day's presidential election.
You would have thought that meant the end of newspapers. What future did print media have if soon people all over the world owned a device that read them the news?
Yet newspapers remained resilient long after radio was invented and it even withstood a new challenge when the first ever commercial television broadcast went live at the World's Fair in New York on April 20, 1939. Words and moving pictures — take that, newsprint!
The three media — newspapers, radio and TV — coexisted peacefully (more or less) for another half century, and then the internet came along* and changed everything, the way we consume news being the least of it.
*—(Unlike television and radio, it's really hard to pinpoint the exact origin of the internet and its user-friendly version, the World Wide Web. Some say it was 1991, other accounts put it as early as 1980. Who cares, really?)
It was a slow death, to be sure. First came those dial-up internet services like "CompuGrowth" and "MegaNet" and "Americans On Line" and you needed a dial-up modem that made weird sounds and those CDs that came in the mail every day*, and all that was kind of clunky so newspapers were relatively safe. But then internet service became faster and more efficient and computers got cheaper and more portable.
*—(By the gross, it seemed.)
All while this was happening, three major paradigm shifts took place that spelled the end for news on printed paper. The first was obvious, the second happened without anyone noticing really but was the major trend that killed an entire industry, and the third was far more insidious, but, unlike the first two, was entirely the industry's fault.
I'll break 'em down for you.
First, obviously, people stopped reading newspapers' print editions in favor of online news. And the whole time, newspaper companies inexplicably gave it all away for free*. That meant fewer readers paying for the product and, far more importantly, not looking at print advertising. And once the internet moved from stationary home computers to laptops, phones and tablets, meaning you could take the digital paper to the beach and on airplanes, it was over for the printed page.
*—(To be fair, everything was free on the web in the 1990s, and I guess the newspaper companies figured their web versions could be written off as a form of advertising that drove people to the print edition. Big mistake.)
Second, and this was the big one — was the birth of eBay and CraigsList. Remember when you had to sell your truck or give away a trampoline? There was only one place to do it — the newspaper classified section. Sellers bought classified advertising space to move their old junk and buyers bought papers to see what was out there. Newspapers then used that revenue to pay reporters to cover local news and pay the electricity bills in their newsrooms. Once people started using the web to buy and sell stuff*, classified advertising — and all the money that came with it — went away and never came back.
*—(And why wouldn't they? It’s better! You can reach far more people and buy far more stuff, and they’re free to use!)
Finally — and believe me, I'm going to be writing a lot more on this topic in future posts — there was the horrible way the newspaper industry reacted to it all. Instead of saying, hey, let's make our product better and find creative ways to replace the revenue lost from the end of classified ads, they just cut, cut, cut. They laid off employees. They discontinued features. They stopped subscribing to wire services. They closed newsrooms. All in the hopes of turning their financial fortunes around.
It didn't happen. Newspapers became, well, sh*tty. Look at any newspaper — the ones that still exist — and see the results. It's as thin as a comic book and costs three bucks.
And the biggest tragedy of all? Newspaper readership never really declined. Yeah, people shifted their eyeballs from print to the web, but interest in the news has always remained high. Newspapers' shift to digital, in many ways, actually resulted in more readers, not fewer. The industry just never found a way to monetize the trend.
In conclusion... you know what? I have no conclusion. When it comes to what could restore the industry to competitiveness and (maybe?) profitability, I just don't know what the answer is. But through this newsletter, we'll continue to explore it. I doubt we'll find any easy answers, but maybe we can at least figure out where to go from here.
— JD