Newspapers’ painful saga and the winners from the digital media revolution
Lesson summary
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where JR and I help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. Today’s lesson is number 433, so JR has uploaded the content to—where else?—PlainEnglish.com/433.
Coming up today, the first in a two-part series on the media industry. The internet age has not been good to traditional newspapers. But the industry has turned a corner, in part by consolidating, but also by specializing, as you’ll see. In the second part next week, we’ll talk about the hottest new trend in American media.
The English expression we’ll review today is “eat into” and JR has a song of the week. Let’s get going.
Print newspapers are dead. Long live the digital subscription
One of the big stories of the Internet age has been the decline of American local newspapers. In the early days of print, big cities had multiple publications all competing for readers. At the time, the industry was characterized by high drama, big money, and few ethics. The old adage, “If it bleeds, it leads” revealed that sensationalist crime stories were the biggest sellers. Busy street corners had competing paperboys screaming out the headlines in the papers they were selling.
In the Twentieth Century, the industry matured. Journalists followed generally accepted ethics and guidelines. Most big cities had two or three dailies; medium-sized cities had one daily; and many small towns had a weekly paper. A career in journalism never meant big money, but it was a stable, prestigious job that involved (for some) the chance to travel the world. Newspaper writers were motivated by the fact that the residents of their cities would learn about the whole world by reading their words. The start of World War I, the sinking of the Titanic, revolutions in far-off lands: the world read about it all in local and regional newspapers.
But radio, and then television, began to eat into print newspapers’ audience. The advent of 24-hour cable news in the early 1990s took a toll. And then the internet age crushed the newspaper industry.
The news industry made a critical mistake at the beginning of the internet era: they put all their content online for free and in doing so they conditioned their customers to expect to get the news for no charge. As readers moved online, revenue from print ads dried up. Online ads never made up the difference. As a result, many newspapers closed or slimmed down. Since 2004, the U.S. lost a quarter of its newspapers. Famous names like the Rocky Mountain Post, Tampa Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Honolulu Advertiser all closed or merged.
In a way, that made a certain amount of economic sense. Why should Los Angeles and San Diego, just two hours driving apart, both send reporters to Sacramento to cover California politics? In the digital age, consolidation makes sense. Local publications should focus on local issues, while national and specialty organizations should cover the big stuff.
Luckily, there are signs that that is happening. After years of losing money online, quality publications have successfully established paywalls for all or some of their content. And consumers are starting to pay for quality news, perhaps because they’re exhausted by the low-quality news available on television. What’s even more interesting is that consumers are open to paying for multiple subscriptions at once.
The New York Times and the Washington Post were both the dominant newspapers in their cities; today, they are international publications with seven and three million paid online subscribers, respectively. They are the biggest general-interest publications with paywalls.
Many publications specialize in a niche, which allows them to target customers most interested in that niche. In business, The Wall Street Journal in New York and the Financial Times in London have three and a half million paid subscribers between them. The Athletic is an online-only sports-focused outlet founded in 2016 that has never published free content. The five-year-old sports publication now has over a million paid subscribers. Tech Crunch focuses on startups and technology.
Politico has a different paywall strategy. Politico focuses on political content in America and Europe; they make their money offering ultra-premium content to a small number of users, and giving the rest away for free.
Outside the U.S., some big newspapers have had success attracting paid subscribers. The Times, The Guardian, and The Telegraph of London all have several hundred thousand subscribers; Le Monde from France, Bild from Germany, and Corriere Della Sera from Italy have all found success with the subscriber model. In Latin America, Clarín and La Nación from Argentina are both leaders in the paid subscriber model.
However, the consolidation in the industry still left a lot of journalists without newspapers to write for, and a lot of readers with very specific interests. Enter the newest player in journalism: the newsletter. What, you might be thinking, is new about a newsletter? That is what we’ll talk about next week.
Memories of The Brookfield Journal
Most of the newspapers that are closing are the local weekly newspapers. These are full of cheesy, feel-good content: what kids got the best grades in school, who baked the best pastries for the parade, things like that. The Brookfield Journal was the local weekly newspaper in my town; it closed in 2009.
I was on the front page of The Brookfield Journal one week. I think I was 12. I was on a rappelling trip; it’s like rock climbing, but you go down instead of up. They got a picture of me, one friend, and the instructor next to us as we were rappelling down the face of a cliff in our town. The instructor did a flip for the camera, so he was upside down as my friend and I were hanging on for dear life.
Everyone in our town read The Brookfield Journal. I don’t know what they do now, but I bet it’s not the same as having a hand-delivered newspaper telling you all the town’s news.
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