Imagine you are a news editor. You have been asked to respond to an online discussion thread regarding how information media has affected American culture.
Answer each of the following questions in 100 to 150 words:
Does the information media have social responsibility? If yes, in what ways? If not, why not?
YOUR FRIENDS KNOW YOU HAVE A GOOD HEAD FOR MONEY, SO YOU’RE THE GO-TO
PERSON FOR ALL THEIR FINANCIAL QUESTIONS. But this one was a bit out of the
ordinary. Chris wanted investment advice on the best place to put a fairly sizeable
inheritance from a hardly known uncle. Your reply—Newspapers!—caused something of a
stir, not only with Chris, but with just about everyone else who heard about it. Tired of telling
the same story over and over again, you posted your argument on your Facebook page for
the world to see.
OK, everybody, newspapers? It’s not as crazy as Chris makes it sound. Yes, the economics of the
newspaper industry are in bad shape. But as an investment, newspapers are a good deal. They
make money! You might ask why Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post or sports
billionaire John Henry purchased the Boston Globe? Good question, but a better one is why does
Warren Buffett own 70 papers? Maybe it’s because publicly traded newspaper company stocks
showed gains of 60% and more from 2012 to 2013 (Edmonds, 2014). Maybe it’s because, as the
legendary billionaire investor himself said, “In Grand Island, Nebraska, everyone is interested in
how the football team does. They’re interested in who got married. They’re maybe even more
interested in who got divorced” (in Blagg, 2014). Buffett knows newspapers are an indispensable
local medium; being so indispensable, his papers earn a 10% after-tax profit (better than most
businesses). This not only makes him and his investors money, but now banks are also starting to
look at papers again as a place to put their money. That means more investment, which means a
better product, which means more profit (Das, 2014). So yes, newspapers! Like all traditional media
they are undergoing disruptive transition, but they still make money!
In this chapter we examine that disruptive transition—radical change in an industry
brought about by the introduction of a new technology or product—and what it means for
the relationship between the newspaper and its readers. We start with a look at the
medium’s roots, beginning with the first papers, following them from Europe to colonial
America, where many of the traditions of today’s free press were set. We study the cultural
changes that led to the creation of the penny press and to competition between these mass
circulation dailies that gave us “yellow journalism.”
We then review the modern newspaper in terms of its size and scope. We discuss different
types of newspapers and the importance of newspapers as an advertising medium. The wire
and feature services, important providers of newspaper content, are also highlighted.
We then detail how the relationship between medium and audience is shifting as a result
of the loss of competition within the industry, hypercommercialism in the guise of
commercial pressure on papers’ editorial content, the positive and negative impacts of new
and converging technology, the rise of online newspapers, and changes in the nature of
newspaper readership. Finally, we test our media literacy skill through a discussion of how
to read the newspaper—for example, interpreting the relative positioning of stories.
A Short History of Newspapers
The opening vignette makes an important point about contemporary newspapers—they are
in a state of disruption, but they are working hard and often successfully to secure new
identities for themselves in an increasingly crowded media environment. As a medium and
as an industry, newspapers are in the midst of a significant change in their role and
operation. The changing relationship between newspapers and readers is part of this
upheaval. And while it’s not uncommon to read or hear comments such as this one from
about 10 years ago from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, “There will be no media consumption
left in 10 years that is not delivered over IP [Internet Protocol] network. There will be no
newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an
electronic form” (in Dumenco, 2008, p. 48), newspapers in paper form are still around. They
have faced similar challenges more than once in the past and have survived.
The Earliest Newspapers
Page 73 In Caesar’s time, Rome had a newspaper. The Acta Diurna (actions of the day),
carved on a tablet, was posted on a wall after each meeting of the Senate. Its circulation was
one, and there is no reliable measure of its total readership. However, it does show that
people have always wanted to know what was happening and that others have helped them
do so.
The newspapers we recognize today have their roots in 17th-century
Europe. Corantos, one-page news sheets about specific events, were printed in English in
Holland in 1620 and imported to England by British booksellers who were eager to satisfy
public demand for information about Continental happenings that eventually led to what we
now call the Thirty Years’ War.
Englishmen Nathaniel Butter, Thomas Archer, and Nicholas Bourne eventually began
printing their own occasional news sheets, using the same title for consecutive editions. They
stopped publishing in 1641, the same year that regular, daily accounts of local news started
appearing in other news sheets. These true forerunners of our daily newspaper were
called diurnals, but by the 1660s the word newspaper had entered the English language
(Lepore, 2009).
Political power struggles in England at this time boosted the fledgling medium, as
partisans on the side of the monarchy and those on the side of Parliament published papers
to bolster their positions. When the monarchy prevailed, it granted monopoly publication
rights to the Oxford Gazette, the official voice of the Crown. Founded in 1665 and later
renamed the London Gazette, this journal used a formula of foreign news, official
information, royal proclamations, and local news that became the model for the first colonial
newspapers.
COLONIAL NEWSPAPERS In the colonies, bookseller/print shops became the focal point for
the exchange of news and information, which led to the beginning of the colonial newspaper.
It was at these establishments that broadsides (sometimes referred to
as broadsheets), single-sheet announcements or accounts of events imported from
England, would be posted. In 1690 Boston bookseller/printer (and coffeehouse owner)
Benjamin Harris printed his own broadside, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and
Domestick. Intended for continuous publication, the country’s first paper lasted only one day;
Harris had been critical of local and European dignitaries, and he had also failed to obtain a
license.
More successful was Boston postmaster John Campbell, whose 1704 Boston NewsLetter survived until the Revolution. The paper featured foreign news, reprints of articles
from England, government announcements, and shipping news. It was dull, and it was also
expensive. Nonetheless, it established the newspaper in the Colonies.
The Boston News-Letter was able to survive in part because of government subsidies. With
government support came government control, but the buildup to the Revolution helped
establish the medium’s independence. In 1721 Boston had three papers. James
Franklin’s New-England Courant was the only one publishing without authority.
The Courant was popular and controversial, but when it criticized the Massachusetts
governor, Franklin was jailed for printing “scandalous libels.” When released, he returned to
his old ways, earning himself and the Courant a publishing ban, which he circumvented by
installing his younger brother Benjamin as nominal publisher. Ben Franklin soon moved to
Philadelphia, and without his leadership the Courant was out of business in three years. Its
lasting legacy, however, was in proving that a newspaper with popular support could indeed
challenge authority.
In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin established a print shop and later, in 1729, took over a
failing newspaper, which he revived and renamed the Pennsylvania Gazette. By combining
the income from his bookshop and printing businesses with that from his popular daily,
Franklin could run the Gazette with significant independence. Even though he held the
contract for Philadelphia’s official printing, he was unafraid to criticize those in authority. In
addition, he began to develop advertising support, which also helped shield his newspaper
from government control by decreasing its dependence on official printing contracts for
survival. Ben Franklin demonstrated that financial independence could lead to editorial
independence. It was not, however, a guarantee.
▲ The first daily newspaper to appear in the 13 Colonies, Publick Occurrences Both
Foreign and Domestick, lasted all of one edition. Courtesy of John Frost Historical
Newspapers Page 74
▲ Benjamin Franklin published America’s first political cartoon—
“Join, or Die,” a rallying call for the Colonies—in his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754.
© History Archives/Alamy
In 1734 New York Weekly Journal publisher John Peter Zenger was jailed for criticizing
that colony’s royal governor. The charge was seditious libel, and the verdict was based not
on the truth or falsehood of the printed words but on whether they had been printed. The
criticisms had been published, so Zenger was clearly guilty. But his attorney, Andrew
Hamilton, argued to the jury, “For the words themselves must be libelous, that is, false,
scandalous and seditious, or else we are not guilty.” Zenger’s peers agreed, and he was freed.
The case of Peter Zenger became a symbol of colonial newspaper independence from the
Crown, and its power was evident in the refusal by publishers to accept the Stamp Act in
1765.
NEWSPAPERS AFTER INDEPENDENCE After the Revolution, the new government of the
United States had to determine for itself just how free a press it was willing to tolerate. When
the first Congress convened under the new Constitution in 1790, the nation’s founders
debated, drafted, and adopted the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, called the Bill of
Rights. The First Amendment reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peacefully to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
But a mere eight years later, fearful of the subversive activities of foreigners sympathetic
to France, Congress passed a group of four laws known collectively as the Alien and
Sedition Acts. The Sedition Act made illegal writing, publishing, or printing “any false
scandalous and malicious writing” about the president, Congress, or the federal government.
So unpopular were these laws with a people who had just waged a war of independence
against similar limits on their freedom of expression that they were not renewed when
Congress reconsidered them two years later in 1800. See the chapter on media freedom,
regulation, and ethics for more detail on the ongoing commitment to the First Amendment,
freedom of the press, and open expression in the United States.
▲ Volume 1, Number 1 of Benjamin Day’s New York Sun, the first of the penny papers. ©
The Granger Collection, NY
The Modern Newspaper Emerges
At the turn of the 19th century, New York City provided all the ingredients necessary for a
new kind of audience for a new kind of newspaper and a new kind of journalism. The island
city was densely populated, a center of culture, commerce, and politics, and especially
because of the wave of immigrants that had come to its shores, demographically diverse. Add
to this growing literacy among working people, and conditions were ripe for the penny
press, one-cent newspapers for everyone. Benjamin Day’s September 3, 1833, issue of
the New York Sun was the first of the penny papers. Day’s innovation was to sell his paper so
inexpensively that it would attract a large readership, which could then be “sold” to
advertisers. Day succeeded because he anticipated a new kind of reader. He filled the Sun’s
pages with police and court reports, crime stories, entertainment news, and human interest
stories. Because the paper lived up to its motto, “The Sun shines for all,” there was little of
the elite political and business information that had characterized earlier papers.
Page 75 Soon there were penny papers in all the major cities. Among the most important
was James Gordon Bennett’s New York Morning Herald. Although more sensationalistic than
the Sun, the Herald pioneered the correspondent system, placing reporters in Washington,
D.C., and other major U.S. cities as well as abroad. Correspondents filed their stories by
means of the telegraph, invented in 1844. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was an
important penny paper as well. Its nonsensationalistic, issues-oriented, and humanitarian
reporting established the mass newspaper as a powerful medium of social action.
THE PEOPLE’S MEDIUM People typically excluded from the social, cultural, and political
mainstream quickly saw the value of the mass newspaper. The first African American
newspaper was Freedom’s Journal, published initially in 1827 by John B. Russwurm and the
Reverend Samuel Cornish. Forty others soon followed, but it was Frederick Douglass who
made best use of the new mass circulation style in his newspaper The Ram’s Horn, founded
expressly to challenge the editorial policies of Benjamin Day’s Sun. Although this particular
effort failed, Douglass had established himself and the minority press as a viable voice for
those otherwise silenced. Douglass’s North Star, founded in 1847 with the masthead slogan
“Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren,”
was the most influential African American newspaper before the Civil War.
The most influential African American newspaper after the Civil War, and the first Black
paper to be a commercial success (its predecessors typically were subsidized by political and
church groups), was the Chicago Defender. First published on May 5, 1905, by Robert
Sengstacke Abbott, the Defender eventually earned a nationwide circulation of more than
230,000. Especially after Abbott declared May 15, 1917, the date of “the Great Northern
Drive,” the Defender’s central editorial goal was to encourage southern Black people to move
north.
“I beg of you, my brothers, to leave that benighted land. You are free men. . . . Get out of the
South,” Abbott editorialized (as quoted in Fitzgerald, 1999, p. 18). The paper would regularly
contrast horrific accounts of southern lynchings with northern African American success
stories. Within two years of the start of the Great Drive, more than 500,000 former slaves
and their families moved north. Within two more years, another 500,000 followed.
Native Americans found early voice in papers such as the Cherokee Phoenix, founded in
1828 in Georgia, and the Cherokee Rose Bud, which began operation 20 years later in
Oklahoma. The rich tradition of the Native American newspaper is maintained today around
the country in publications such as the Oglala Sioux Lakota Times and the Shoshone–
Bannock Sho-Ban News, as well as on the World Wide Web. For example, the Cherokee
Observer is at www.cherokeeobserver.org; the Navajo Times is at navajotimes.com;
and News from Indian Country can be found at www.indiancountrynews.com.
Throughout this early period of the popularization of the newspaper, numerous foreignlanguage dailies also began operation, primarily in major cities in which immigrants tended
to settle. Sloan, Stovall, and Startt (1993) report that in 1880 there were more than 800
foreign-language newspapers published in German, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and various
Scandinavian languages. As you’ll see later in this chapter, the modern foreign language
press is enjoying significant success in today’s era of flat or falling readership for more
mainstream papers.
THE FIRST WIRE SERVICES In 1848, six large New York papers, including
the Sun, the Herald, and the Tribune, decided to pool efforts and share expenses collecting
news from foreign ships docking at the city’s harbor. After determining rules of membership
and other organizational issues, in 1856 the papers established the first news-gathering (and
distribution) organization, the New York Associated Press. Other domestic wire
services, originally named for their reliance on the telegraph, followed—the Associated
Press in 1900, the United Press in 1907, and the International News Service in 1909.
This innovation, with its assignment of correspondents to both foreign and domestic
bureaus, had a number of important implications. First, it greatly expanded the breadth and
scope of coverage a newspaper could offer its readers. This was a boon to dailies wanting to
attract as many readers as possible. Greater coverage of distant domestic news helped unite
an expanding country while encouraging even more expansion. The United States was a
nation of immigrants, and news from people’s homelands drew more readers. Second, the
nature of reporting began to change. Reporters could now produce stories by Page
76 rewriting—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot—the actual on-the-spot coverage of
others. Finally, newspapers were able to reduce expenses (and increase profits) because
they no longer needed to have their own reporters in all locations.
YELLOW JOURNALISM In 1883 Hungarian immigrant Joseph Pulitzer bought the
troubled New York World. Adopting a populist approach to the news, he brought a crusading,
activist style of coverage to numerous turn-of-the-century social problems—growing slums,
labor tensions, and failing farms, to name a few. The audience for his “new journalism” was
the “common man,” and he succeeded in reaching readers with light, sensationalistic news
coverage, extensive use of illustrations, and circulation-building stunts and promotions (for
example, an around-the-world balloon flight). Ad revenues and circulation figures exploded.
Soon there were other new journalists. William Randolph Hearst applied Pulitzer’s
successful formula to his San Francisco Examiner, and then in 1895 he took on Pulitzer
himself in New York by purchasing the failing New York Morning Journal. The competition
between Hearst’s Morning Journal and Pulitzer’s World was so intense that it debased
newspapers and journalism as a whole, which is somewhat ironic in that Pulitzer later
founded the prize for excellence in journalism that still bears his name.
Drawing its name from the Yellow Kid, a popular cartoon character of the time, yellow
journalism was a study in excess—sensational sex, crime, and disaster news; giant
headlines; heavy use of illustrations; and reliance on cartoons and color. It was successful at
first, and other papers around the country adopted all or part of its style. Although public
reaction to the excesses of yellow journalism soon led to its decline, traces of its popular
features remain. Large headlines, big front-page pictures, extensive use of photos and
illustrations, and cartoons are characteristic even of today’s best newspapers.
▲ Several of yellow journalism’s excesses—dramatic graphics, bold headlines, the
reporting of rumor— are evident in this front page from Joseph Pulitzer’s New York
World. Many historians believe that the sinking of the Maine was engineered by yellow
journalist William Randolph Hearst, publisher of the New York Morning Journal, in order to
create a war that his papers could cover as a way to build circulation. © Bettmann/Corbis
Page 77 The years between the era of yellow journalism and the coming of television were
a time of remarkable growth in the development of newspapers. From 1910 to the beginning
of World War II, daily newspaper subscriptions doubled and ad revenues tripled. In 1910
there were 2,600 daily papers in the United States, more than at any time before or since. In
1923, the American Society of Newspaper Editors issued the “Canons of Journalism and
Statement of Principles” in an effort to restore order and respectability after the yellow era.
The opening sentence of the Canons was, “The right of a newspaper to attract and hold
readers is restricted by nothing but considerations of public welfare.” The wire services
internationalized. United Press International started gathering news from Japan in 1909 and
was covering South America and Europe by 1921. In response to the competition from radio
and magazines for advertising dollars, newspapers began consolidating into newspaper
chains—papers in different cities across the country owned by a single company. Hearst and
Scripps were among the most powerful chains in the 1920s. For all practical purposes, the
modern newspaper had now emerged. The next phase of the medium’s life, as we’ll soon see,
begins with the coming of television.
Newspapers and Their Audiences
More than 40 million newspapers are sold daily in the United States, and 70% of
Americans—164 million people—report reading a paper or its website at least once a week,
144 million of those folks doing so on a paper newspaper (Newspaper Association of
America, 2013). The industry that serves those readers looks quite different from the one
that operated before television became a dominant medium. There are now fewer papers.
There are now different types of papers. They deliver the news on different platforms, and
more newspapers are part of large chains.
The advent of television at the end of World War II coincided with several important social
and cultural changes in the United States. Shorter work hours, more leisure, more
expendable cash, movement to the suburbs, and women joining the workforce in greater
numbers all served to alter the newspaper–reader relationship. When the war ended,
circulation equaled 1.24 papers per American household per day; today that figure is 0.37
per household per day (Gitlin, 2013).
Today, Americans may well buy 40 million papers every day, but in 1970, they bought 62.1
million. The number of daily newspapers also continues to fall. There were more than 1,600
in 1990; the current total is around 1,400. In 2008, the Baltimore Examiner, New York Sun,
Albuquerque Tribune, Cincinnati Post, Kentucky Post, and Birmingham Post-Herald closed
shop. In 2009 Denver’s 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News folded and the 146-yearold Seattle Post-Intelligencer converted to Web-only. The 101-year-old Christian Science
Monitor also shut down its print operation to become an online daily and a weekend
newsmagazine. In 2010 the Honolulu Advertiser stopped its presses, and in 2013
Britain’s Lloyd’s List, founded in 1734 and the world’s oldest newspaper, ceased print
production. Circulation has suffered 10 consecutive years of decline, and ad revenues are
falling at a double-digit pace. Today’s newspapers are buffeted by technological and
economic change like no other traditional medium.
Scope and Structure of the Newspaper Industry
Today there are more than 9,000 newspapers operating in the United States. Of these, 15%
are dailies and the rest are weeklies (77%) and semiweeklies (8%). They have a combined
circulation of nearly 130 million. Pass-along readership—readers who did not originally
purchase the paper—brings 104 million people a day in touch with a daily and 200 million a
week in touch with a weekly. But as we’ve seen, overall print circulation is falling despite a
growing population. Therefore, to have success and to ensure their future, newspapers have
had to adjust. Page 78
USING MEDIA TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Nonprofit Newsrooms Fill the Reporting Void
Journalist Chris Hedges wrote, “The death of newsprint represents the end of
an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism,
at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable.
Reporting is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and
talking to people. It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly
for sources, tips, leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts
and information, untold stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding
little or nothing of significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And
as the budgets of large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting
declines.” Another reporter, Gary Kamiya, explained why the Internet is not a
worthy substitute, “What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers
and the related rise of online media is reporting—on-the-ground reporting by
trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides,
strive for objectivity, and are working with editors who check their facts, steer
them in the right direction, and are a further check against unwarranted
assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious
bias” (2009). And yet although “one third of the newspaper newsrooms in
America have disappeared,” said Charles Lewis of the Investigative Reporting
Workshop, “the papers still must cover their markets; they need content” (in
Herskowitz, 2011, p. 58).
Over the last several years, hundreds of nonprofit newsrooms—staffed by
veteran and newly minted professional journalists—have sprung up to fill the
void, hoping to make a difference. Some are funded by foundations, some by
voluntary payments from their for-profit media partners, and some, Spot.us
for example, practice crowdfunded journalism, where journalists pitch stories to
readers who contribute small amounts of money to those they want to see
completed. Large investigative reporting nonprofits ProPublica and the Center
for Public Integrity are backed by major philanthropies like the Ford and Knight
Foundations. And while some nonprofit newsrooms are small and serve local
communities and local media, many maintain partnerships with major national
media. The New York Times uses the work of nonprofit newsrooms in Chicago,
San Francisco, and other locations to strengthen its reporting in those locales.
In addition to the Times, major media outlets such as 60 Minutes, National Public
Radio, Salon, USA Today, NBC-owned television stations, the Los Angeles Times,
Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Washington Post make regular use of several
nonprofits’ investigative reporting on controversial and expensive
investigations into issues like natural gas drilling, abuse of federal stimulus
dollars, and the failure of many of the nation’s coroner and medical examiner
offices. Have nonprofit newsrooms made a difference? “We can get to do the
kind of investigative and enterprise stories we wouldn’t be able to singularly,”
says public radio’s Bill Davis (in Rainey, 2011). The Center for Public Integrity
“has won over 40 national journalism awards. ProPublica has won two Pulitzer
Prizes, and they’ve been around only since 2008. The Center for Investigative
Reporting, started in ’77, has also won dozens of national journalism awards”
(Herskowitz, 2011, p. 61). Columbia Journalism Review maintains a list of more
than 200 nonprofit newsrooms on their website.
Types of Newspapers
We’ve cited statistics about dailies and weeklies, but these categories actually include many
different types of papers. Let’s take a closer look at some of them.
NATIONAL DAILY NEWSPAPERS We typically think of the newspaper as a local medium,
our town’s paper. But two national daily newspapers enjoy large circulations and significant
social and political impact. The older and more respected is the Wall Street Journal, founded
in 1889 by Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Today, as then, its focus is on the world of
business, although its definition of business is broad. The Journal has a circulation of 1.4
million (2.3 million including digital subscribers), and an average household income of its
readers of $150,000 makes it a favorite for upscale advertisers. In 2007 it became part of
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media empire.
The other national daily is USA Today. Founded in 1982, it calls itself “The Nation’s
Newspaper,” and despite early derision from industry pros for its lack of depth and apparent
dependence on style over substance, it has become a serious national newspaper with
significant global influence. Today, the paper’s daily circulation of 1.6 million (4.2 million
including special branded editions and digital subscriptions) suggests that readers
welcome Page 79 its mix of short, lively, upbeat stories; full-color graphics; state-by-state
news and sports briefs; and liberal use of easy-to-read illustrated graphs and tables.
LARGE METROPOLITAN DAILIES To be a daily, a paper must be published at least five
times a week. The circulation of big-city dailies has dropped over the past 30 years, and they
continue to lose circulation at a rate approaching 10% a year (Rosenstiel & Mitchell, 2011).
Many old, established papers, including the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Washington
Star, have stilled their presses in recent years. When the Chicago Daily News closed its doors,
it had the sixth-highest circulation in the country.
As big cities cease to be industrial centers, homes, jobs, and interests have turned away
from downtown. Those large metropolitan dailies that are succeeding have used a number
of strategies to cut costs and to attract and keep more suburban-oriented readers. Some
publish zoned editions—suburban or regional versions of the paper—to attract readers
and to combat competition for advertising dollars from the suburban papers. But oncecustomary features like these zoned editions (Providence Journal), stand-alone book review
sections (Chicago
Tribune,
Washington
Post), weekly
magazines (Los
Angeles
Times), classified sections (Cincinnati Enquirer, Boston Globe), even daily home
delivery (Cleveland Plain Dealer) are disappearing as papers big and small battle declining
ad revenue and rising production and distribution costs.
The New York Times is a special large metropolitan daily. It is a paper local to New York,
but the high quality of its reporting and commentary, the reach and depth of both its national
and international news, and the solid reputations of its features (such as the weekly Times
Magazine and the Book Review) make it the nation’s newspaper of record. Its print
circulation hovers between 600,000 and 700,000 a day, and its digital subscribers bring that
number to more than 2 million daily readers.
SUBURBAN AND SMALL-TOWN DAILIES As the United States has become a nation of
transient suburb dwellers, so too has the newspaper been suburbanized. Since 1985 the
number of suburban dailies has increased by 50%, and one, Long Island’s Newsday, is the
12th largest paper in the country, with a print circulation of over 265,000.
Small-town dailies operate much like their suburban cousins if there is a nearby large
metropolitan paper; for example, the Eagle-Tribune publishes in the shadow of Boston’s two
big dailies. Its focus is the Merrimack River Valley region in Massachusetts, and southern
New Hampshire, 25 miles northwest of Boston. If the small-town paper has no big-city
competition, it can serve as the heart of its community. Figure 1 details the value of the local
paper and should help explain the investor interest in community newspaper stocks
described in the opening vignette.
▲ Figure 1 The Value of the Local Newspaper.
Source: Data Page, 2013a. © McGraw-Hill Education/Andrew Resek, photographer Page 80
▲ High school sports, part of the “holy trinity” of local news buoying community papers’
bottom lines.
© Susan Baran
WEEKLIES AND SEMIWEEKLIES Many weeklies and semiweek-lies have prospered
because advertisers have followed them to the suburbs. Community reporting makes them
valuable to those people who identify more with their immediate environment than they do
with the neighboring big city. Suburban advertisers like the narrowly focused readership
and more manageable advertising rates. Readers looking for national and international news
have hundreds of online sources for that information. But those looking for local and regional
news as well as the “holy trinity” of local information—high school sports, obituaries, and
the police blotter—do not.
THE ETHNIC PRESS One hundred and thirty U.S. cities are served by at least one Spanishlanguage publication. This number remains constant as publications backed by Englishlanguage papers, such as the Tribune Company’s Hoy (in several cities) and the Dallas
Morning News’s Al Día, join more traditional weekly and semiweekly independent Spanishlanguage papers, such as the nation’s several La Voz Hispana papers. This phenomenal
stability is a result of three factors. First, the big dailies have realized, as have all media, that
to be successful (and, in this case, to reverse long-standing declines in circulation) they must
reach an increasingly fragmented audience. Second, at more than 18% of the population, selfdescribed Hispanic or Latino people represent not only a sizable fragment of the overall
audience but America’s fastest-growing minority group. Third, because the newspaper is the
most local of the mass media, and nonnative speakers tend to identify closely with their
immediate locales, Spanish-language papers—like most foreign-language papers—
command a loyal readership, one attractive to advertisers who have relatively few other
ways to reach this group. In fact, annual advertising spending on Hispanic and Latino media
is growing at a rate 10 times faster than that of overall U.S. ad spending (Wentz, 2014).
African American papers, as they have for a century and a half, remain a vibrant part of
this country’s ethnic press. African Americans represent about 12% of the total population.
But because English is their native language, African Americans typically read mainstream
papers. In fact, after Whites they represent the second-largest group of newspaper readers
in the country. Still, 250 dailies, weeklies, and semiweeklies aim specifically at African
Americans. And papers like the Amsterdam News in New York, the Philadelphia New
Observer, and the Minnesota Spokesman Recorder, the second-oldest minority publication in
America, specialize in urban-based journalism unlike that found in the traditional
mainstream dailies.
▲ America’s foreign language readers are served by a robust ethnic press.
© Susan Baran Page 81
A robust ethnic press exists beyond Spanish-language and African American papers. For
example, New York City is home to foreign-language papers serving nationalities speaking
50 different languages—in the Bs alone there are Bangladeshi, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Brazilian,
and Byelorussian. The Is have Indian, Iranian, Irish, Israeli, and Italian. In addition, the United
States is home to more than 200 other foreign language papers.
THE ALTERNATIVE PRESS Another type of paper, most commonly a weekly and available
at no cost, is the alternative press. The offspring of the underground press of the 1960s
antiwar, antiracism, pro-drug culture, these papers have redefined themselves. The most
successful among them—the Village Voice, the L.A. Weekly, the Miami New Times, and
the Seattle Weekly—succeed by attracting upwardly mobile young people and young
professionals, not the disaffected counterculture readers who were their original audiences.
Their strategy of downplaying politics and emphasizing events listings, local arts advertising,
and eccentric personal classified ads has permitted the country’s 117 alternative weeklies to
attract 25 million hard-copy and online readers a week. But this figure masks the fact that
the number of hard-copy readers is in decline, as content once considered “alternative” and
therefore not suited for traditional newspapers is quite at home on the Web. In response,
most alternative papers have a Web presence, and there are now Web-only alternative
“papers,” leading the industry trade group, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, to
change its name in 2011 to the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. Nonetheless, overall
readership decreased by 6% in 2013, and those 117 alternative weeklies is actually a drop
from the 135 in 2009 (Mullin, 2014).
COMMUTER PAPERS Modeled after a common form of European newspaper, free dailies
designed for commuters are becoming commonplace in America’s biggest cities. Like the
most successful Spanish-language papers, they represent the major dailies’ effort to reach a
segment of the audience not likely to buy the parent papers’ product. Here, though, the target
is young readers (who are already used to getting free media from the alternative press and
the Internet) and the goal is twofold. First, these readers represent a valuable demographic,
one especially attractive to local advertisers, the newspaper’s bread-and-butter financial
base. Second, the big dailies hope these young readers will develop the daily newspaperreading habit and will become regular newspaper readers. Typical of the
successful commuter papers are the Washington Post’s Express and the Tribune
Company’s amNewYork.
The Newspaper as an Advertising Medium
The reason we have the number and variety of newspapers we do is that readers value them.
When newspapers prosper financially, it is because advertisers recognize their worth as an
ad medium. Nonetheless, the difficult truth for newspapers is that print advertising revenues
fell from nearly $50 billion in 2005 to $23.6 billion in 2013. The $3.4 billion in online
advertising papers sold in that year hardly compensated for that precipitous decline,
especially as this was a period of increases in overall ad spending across all media (Doctor,
2015). Still, $27 billion in annual sales suggests that advertisers find newspapers’ readers an
attractive audience. One reason is papers’ reach. Seventy percent of all Americans read a
print or online paper every week, four out of 10 every day, or the equivalent of a daily Super
Bowl broadcast. A second reason is good demographics. Newspaper readers tend to be
white-collar employed adults, to be college graduates, and to have household incomes over
$100,000 (Sigmund, 2010). Finally, newspapers are local. Supermarkets, car dealers,
department stores, movie theaters, and other local merchants who want to announce a sale
or offer a coupon or circular automatically turn to the local paper. As a result, newspapers
garner a greater proportion of all local advertising dollars—22%—than any other local
medium (Friedman, 2013).
▲ Meeting the needs of a fragmented audience—a free commuter paper.
© Erica Leeds
The News and Feature Services
Page 82 Much of the 35% of the newspaper that is not advertising space is filled with content
provided by outside sources, specifically the news and feature services. News services, as
we’ve already seen, collect news and distribute it to their members. (They are no longer
called “wire” services because they no longer use telephone wires. Today material is more
likely to come by computer network or satellite.) Unlike the early days of the wire services,
today’s member is three times more likely to be a broadcast outlet than a newspaper. These
radio and television stations receive voice and video, as well as written copy. In all cases,
members receive a choice of material, most commonly national and international news, state
and regional news, sports, business news, farm and weather reports, and human interest and
consumer material.
The feature services, called feature syndicates, do not gather and distribute news.
Instead, they operate as clearinghouses for the work of columnists, essayists, cartoonists,
and other creative individuals. Among the material provided (by wire, by computer, or
physically in packages) are opinion pieces such as commentaries by Ellen Goodman or
Garrison Keillor; horoscope, chess, and bridge columns; editorial cartoons, such as the work
of Scott Willis and Ben Sergeant; and comics, the most common and popular form of
syndicated material. Among the major syndicates, the best known are the New York
Times News Service, King Features, Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA),
the Washington Post News Service, and United Feature Syndicate.
▲ Newspapers remain a powerful ad medium because their readers tend to be collegeeducated, white-collar-employed adults—the kinds of folks with a lot of disposable income.
© Dave Krieger/Getty Images
Trends and Convergence in Newspaper Publishing
Loss of competition within the industry, hypercommercialism, convergence, and the
evolution of newspaper readership are altering not only the nature of the medium but also
its relationship with its audiences.
Loss of Competition
•
•
The newspaper industry has seen a dramatic decline in competition. This has taken two
forms: loss of competing papers and concentration of ownership. In 1923, 502 American
cities had two or more competing (having different ownership) dailies. Today, fewer than 20
have separate competing papers. With circulation and advertising revenues leveling out for
urban dailies, very few cities can support more than one paper. Congress attempted to
reverse this trend with the 1970 Newspaper Preservation Act, which allowed joint
operating agreements (JOAs). A JOA permits a failing paper to merge most aspects of its
business with a successful local competitor as long as their editorial and reporting
operations remain separate. The philosophy is that it is better to have two more or less
independent papers in one city than to allow one to close. Six cities, including Detroit and
Charleston, WV, currently have JOAs.
The concern behind the creation of JOAs was editorial diversity. Cities with only one
newspaper have only one newspaper editorial voice. This runs counter to two long-held
American beliefs about the relationship between a free press and its readers:
Truth flows from a multitude of tongues.
The people are best served by a number of antagonistic voices.
Page 83 These are the same values that fuel worry over concentration as well. What
becomes of political, cultural, and social debate when there are neither multiple nor
antagonistic (or at least different) voices? Media critic Robert McChesney (1997) offered this
answer: “As ownership concentrated nationally in the form of chains, journalism came to
reflect the partisan interests of owners and advertisers, rather than the diverse interests of
any given community” (p. 13). Today, five chains— Gannett (90 papers), Tribune (8), New
York Times (16), Advance Publications (59), and Media News Group (54)—receive more
than half of all newspaper industry revenue.
Chains are not new. Hearst owned several big-city papers in the 1880s, but at that time
most cities enjoyed significant competition between papers. Now that most communities
have only one paper, nonlocal chain or conglomerate control of that voice is more
problematic. Additional concern is raised about chain ownership when the chain is also a
media conglomerate, owning several different types of media outlets, as well as other
nonmedia companies. Will the different media holdings speak with one corporate voice? Will
they speak objectively, and will they cover at all the doings of their nonmedia corporations?
Chains do have their supporters. Although some critics see big companies as more
committed to profit and shareholder dividends, others see chains such as McClatchy (30
papers), winner of numerous Pulitzer Prizes and other awards, as turning expanded
economic and journalistic resources toward better service and journalism. Some critics see
outside ownership as uncommitted to local communities and issues, but others see balance
and objectivity (especially important in one-paper towns). Ultimately, we must recognize
that not all chains operate alike. Some operate their holdings as little more than profit
centers; others see profit residing in exemplary service. Some groups require that all their
papers toe the corporate line; others grant local autonomy. Gannett, for example, openly
boasts of its dedication to local management control.
▲ The Miami Herald, a McLatchy paper. Even though newspaper chains have their critics,
defenders point to the McClatchy papers as an example of one chain that uses its size to good
journalistic ends.
© Wilfredo Lee/AP Photo
Conglomeration: Hypercommercialism, Erosion of the Firewall, and
Loss of Mission
As in other media, conglomeration has led to increased pressure on newspapers to turn a
profit. This manifests itself in three distinct but related ways—hypercommercialism, erasure
of the distinction between ads and news, and ultimately, loss of the journalistic mission itself.
Many papers, such as USA Today, the New York Times, the Orange County Register, and
Michigan’s Oakland Press and Macomb Daily, sell ad space on their front pages, once the
exclusive province of news. Other papers, Rhode Island’s Providence Journal, for example,
take this form of hypercommercialism halfway, affixing removable sticker ads to their front
pages. Many papers now permit (and charge for) the placement of pet obituaries alongside
those of deceased humans. The Southeast Missourian sells letters-to-the-editor placement to
those who want to support political candidates.
A second product of conglomeration, say critics, is that the quest for profits at all costs is
eroding the firewall, the once inviolate barrier between newspapers’ editorial and
advertising missions. Although they find the position of “advertorial editor” at
the Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner—whose salary is split equally between the
newsroom and advertising department—strikingly inappropriate, most papers of all sizes
face the same problem. Page 84 For example, newsroom staff at the Daytona Beach News
Journal, including reporters and editors, are asked to sell advertising in order to earn cash
rewards for successful sales (Jackson, 2012). The Long Beach (CA) Beachcomber seldom
sends reporters and/or photographers to staged events, but may do so, in the words of editor
Jeff Beeler, if they are “very newsworthy” or organized by “an advertiser in our newspaper
[who] contribute(s) to the expense of those reporters and photographers” (Romenesko,
2012).
“There’s definitely more interaction as newspapers have come under more financial
pressure,” said Steve Proctor, deputy managing editor for sports and features at
the Baltimore Sun. “It used to be if you had a newspaper in town you were able to make a
steady profit. Now, like so many other things in the world, newspapers are more at the whim
of the opinions of Wall Street analysts. There’s a lot more pressure to increase the profit
margin of the paper, and so that has led to a lot more interplay between the newsroom and
the business side of the paper” (quoted in Vane, 2002, pp. 60-61). Entrepreneur Mark Cuban,
who made his fortune in the Internet’s early days, concurs: “The minute you have to run your
business for share prices, you’ve lost. . . . What [newspapers] should do is step back and ask,
‘What makes us special?’” (Cuban Knows, 2006, p. 10).
Newspapers will die, say conglomeration’s critics, because they will have abandoned their
traditional democratic mission, a failure all the more tragic because despite falling
circulation, more newspapers might have remained financially healthy had they invested
rather than cut when times were good. William Falk, editor in chief of newsmagazine The
Week, wrote that the medium’s demise was “suicide” because owners with their eyes on only
the bottom line continued to slash costs to raise profits and now are “wringing their hands
in puzzlement when circulation keeps going down. Guess what guys? People stop buying
newspapers when there’s nothing in them that they don’t already know” (2005, p. B7).
In the era of record revenues and record profits, papers were laying off staff, closing state
and regional bureaus, hiring younger and less experienced reporters, and shrinking their
newsholes. Newspaper owners were so focused on profit margins that the editors who
worked for them were distracted from finding and running great stories. For example, in
1995, at the time the Baltimore Sun closed its 85-year-old, 86,000-circulation afternoon
edition, it was achieving 37% profit margins. Nonetheless, it fired nearly 100 editors and
reporters. “In the years before the Internet deluge, [these] men and women who might have
made The Sun a more essential vehicle for news and commentary—something so strong that
it might have charged for its product online—were being ushered out the door so that Wall
Street could command short-term profits in the extreme,” wrote press critic John Nichols
(2009, p. C5). The Sun’s owners, the Tribune Company, filed for bankruptcy protection in
2008. Says Bill Marimow, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and former
editor of the Sun, “When editors become focused on accounting rather than journalism, you
have a problem for democracy” (in Outing, 2005).
Convergence with the Internet
Why so much talk about money? You and the new digital technologies are the two
answers. Barron’s online columnist Howard Gold explained, “A crisis of confidence has
combined with a technological revolution and structural economic change to create what can
only be described as a perfect storm. Print’s business model is imploding as younger readers
turn toward free tabloids and electronic media to get news” (in Farhi, 2005, p. 52). It is the
fear that the newspaper industry will fail to successfully weather the storm—Gold’s “crisis
of confidence”—that drives owners and their investors to cut out those characteristics—
especially good journalism—that once defined newspapers.
The Internet has proven most directly to be financially damaging in its attack on
newspapers’ classified advertising business. Before the Internet, classified advertising was
the exclusive domain of local newspapers. Today, the Internet challenges newspapers’ onetime dominance through commercial online classified advertising sites (for example,
eBay, cars.com, and traderonline.com), advertisers connecting directly with customers on
their own sites and bypassing newspapers altogether, and communitarian-minded (that is,
free community-based) sites. Craigslist, for example, originating in San Francisco in 1995, is
now in more than 700 cities across 50 different countries. Craigslist alone cost local papers
more than $5 billion in classified ad revenues from 2000 to 2007, and as a whole, online
classified sites have reduced papers’ income from classified advertising from $20 billion in
2000 to under $5 billion today (Seamans & Zhu, 2013; Edmonds et al., 2013). Advertising
losses are most striking in employment (more than 90%) and auto sales classifieds (more
than 80%; Edmonds et al., 2013). To counter career sites like Monster.com, about one-third
of the papers across the country created their own national service, CareerBuilder, which
rivals Monster’s number of listings but not income. Two hundred dailies also have an
affiliation with Yahoo!’s HotJobs service. Dozens more work with competitor-turned-
partner Monster.com. To counter online auto sales classified sites, as well as real estate and
general merchandise sites, virtually every newspaper in the country now maintains its own
online classified pages. These efforts, however, have done little to save newspapers’ one-time
classified dominance.
▲ One of the more successfui online newspapers. Courtesy of the Boston Globe
The problem of the loss of classified ad income is magnified by the exodus of young people,
that highly desirable demographic, from print to electronic news sources. Only three of 10
American hard-copy newspaper readers are under 45 years old, as young people favor the
Web over print (Thompson, 2014). Not only do the Internet and the World Wide Web
provide readers with more information and more depth, and with greater speed, than the
traditional newspaper, but they empower readers to control and interact with the news, in
essence becoming their own editors in chief. As a result, the traditional newspaper is
reinventing itself by converging with these very same technologies.
The marriage of newspapers to the Web has not yet proved financially successful for the
older medium. The problem is replacing analog dollars with digital dimes. In other words,
despite heavy traffic on newspaper websites—eight in 10 adults who go online will visit a
newspaper website, and those sites amass more than 164 million monthly users—online
readers simply are not worth as much as print readers (Conaghan, 2014). In fact, newspapers
so far have been able to replace every $7 of lost print ad revenue with only $1 of digital ad
revenue. Combining subscription fees and advertising, the newspaper industry was earning
$1,449 per reader in 2000. Now it takes in under $800 per customer (McChesney, 2013;
Chittum, 2014). Still, there are encouraging signs.
The Internet Public Library lists and provides Web links to thousands of online
newspapers for every state in the union and most foreign countries. These papers have
adopted a variety of strategies to become “relevant on the Internet.” The Washington
Post, for example, has joined with Newsweek magazine, cable television channel MSNBC, and
television network NBC to share content among all the parties’ websites and to encourage
users to link to their respective sites. Others (for example, the Boston Globe, the Miami
Herald, and the Kansas City Star) have adopted just the opposite approach, focusing on their
strength as local media by offering websites specific to their newspapers. Each offers not
only what readers might expect to find in these sites’ parent newspapers but also significant
additional information on how to make the most of the cities they represent. These sites are
as much city guides as they are local newspapers.
The local element offers several advantages. Local searchable and archivable classified ads
offer greater efficiency than do the big national classified ad websites such
as Monster.com and Cars.com. No other medium can offer news on crime, housing,
neighborhood politics, zoning, school lunch menus, marriage licenses, and bankruptcies—all
searchable by street or zip code. Local newspapers can use their websites to develop their
own linked secondary sites, thus providing impressive detail on local industry. For example,
the San Jose Mercury News’s SiliconValley.com focuses on the digital industries. Another
localizing strategy is for online papers to build and maintain message boards and chat groups
on their sites that deal with important issues. One more bow to the power of the Web—and
Page 85
users’ demands for interactivity—is that most papers have begun their own blog sites,
inviting readers and journalists to talk to one another.
Despite all this innovation and the readership it generates (“Newspapers don’t have a
demand problem,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “they have a business-model
problem”; in Fallows, 2010, p. 48), Page 86 papers still face two lingering questions about
their online success. The first, as we’ve seen, is how they will earn income from their Web
operations. Internet users expect free content, and for years newspapers were happy to
provide their product for free, simply to establish their presence online. “The central
economic challenge of a newspaper is printing and delivering the newspapers,” explains
journalist and media executive Steven Brill. The Internet should have spared papers that
financial burden, he argues. But the industry, continuing to publish its expensive, dead-tree
versions, found that people were unwilling to pay for what the papers themselves were
giving away for free online (in Thornton, 2009, p. 2). So, newspapers have to fix their
business models.
Among those “fixes” are papers that rely on advertising for their online revenue. Many
continue to provide free access, hoping to attract more readers and, therefore, more
advertising revenue. Some papers even offer free online classifieds to draw people to their
sites (and their paid advertisers). Other papers, recognizing that the Internet surpassed print
papers as a source of news in 2009 (Mindlin, 2009), are experimenting with variations of
a paywall, that is, making all or some of their content available only to those visitors willing
to pay. Many papers, large and small, have strict paywalls; readers gain access only by paying
for it. The Wall Street Journal and the Newport (RI) Daily News employ this method. The New
York Times offers a metered system—print subscribers get all online content for free, but
nonsubscribers are limited to a specified number of free stories before they have to pay. The
metered system is the most common form of paywall. In all, about 30% of American papers
have some form of paywall; and in 2012, for the first time in a decade, newspapers actually
showed an increase in circulation revenue (James, 2013).
CULTURAL FORUM
Attracting Readers with Click Bait
Newspaper readers are moving to the Web, but the industry is still struggling
to find a way to better monetize that digital migration to make up for the
massive loss of print advertising revenue. A question now in the cultural
forum, then, is how far should papers go to bring even more readers,
especially demographically prized young adults, to their sites? With hard-copy
newspapers, the solution to the problem of attracting readers was easy: In
addition to news, offer sports, entertainment news, weather, comics,
horoscopes, and lifestyle reporting— something for everyone—and readers
who might come for one or more of those features (a) bought the paper and
saw the ads (good for business) and (b) might come across some hard news
and opinion of interest as they flipped through the pages in search of their
desired content (good for developing an informed public). This model worked
well for nearly two centuries. It didn’t matter why people bought the paper;
even if they bought it only for the sports, they still bought the whole package.
And that’s how advertising rates were set—how many people bought the
paper, that is, the whole package.
But the Internet is different. People link directly to the stories that interest
them. They can read only sports, only weather, only the crossword puzzle. With
the Internet, ad rates are determined by how many impressions—the number
of times an online ad is seen—an individual article can generate. Professional
reporters researching and writing engaging stories to create more impressions
should be good news for journalism, but critics inside and outside the industry
complain that isn’t what’s happening. Quite the opposite is now true where
reporters are required to write more sensational stories to attract more
readers. New York Times media reporter David Carr explains that journalists who
were once “paid to write when the muse or events beckoned, are now held
accountable for the amount of work they produce and the volume of traffic it
attracts. . . . If I were being paid by the click for this column, I might have
begun it this way: Will an oppressive emphasis on ‘click bait’ mean that the
news ends up imprisoned by transgendered models posing in disgraceful
listicles accompanied by kidnapped nude kittens” (2014, p. B1).
Journalists are increasingly judged (and paid) not by the quality of their
reporting but by Web metrics—realtime tracking by their editors of the number
of clicks, impressions, Tweets, and Facebook likes their work can attract.
Good, argue some observers; this empowerment of the audience “constitutes
a healthy check on the worst habits of journalistic elite” (Christin, 2014).
Enter your voice. Is this good? The newspaper—and the news—have always
lived a dual life, simultaneously a commodity and a public good. But has the
Internet tipped the balance too far in the direction of commodity, simply
something to be bought and sold? Could you, as a reporter, resist chasing
likes and Tweets with click bait, stories designed to gain impressions rather
than make an impression? Knowing that 85% of this country’s professionally
reported serious news comes from newspapers (Copps, 2014), does the
reliance on Web metrics and the rush toward paying reporters based on their
quantity of articles and page views trouble you? Will it mean more quickly
written and less researched news? More lists of best places to eat, feel-good
stories, and articles with more conjecture than facts? Do you agree with Mr.
Carr’s dire warning, “Journalism’s status as a profession is up for grabs. A viral
hit is no longer defined by the credentials of an individual or organization. The
media ecosystem is increasingly a pro-am affair, where the wisdom—or
prurient interest—of the crowd decides what is important and worthy of
sharing” (2014, B1). Defend your answer.
Page 87
All this activity, however, is taking place in the face of two realities of online news. First, if
the story or information is available elsewhere online for free, people are unlikely to pay
anything, even a dime. Therefore, whatever is behind the wall has to be unique. Second,
slightly more than one in 10 Internet users are willing to pay for access to online news (Sass,
2014). Nonetheless, industry research indicates that many papers’ pre-paywall “fears of
precipitous drops in traffic just haven’t materialized” (Mitchell, 2011).
This raises the second question faced by online newspapers, How will circulation be
measured? In fact, if visitors to a newspaper’s website are added to its hard-copy readership,
newspapers are more popular than ever; that is, they are drawing readers in larger numbers
than ever before. Therefore, if many online papers continue to rely on a free-to-the-user, adsupported model to boost their “circulation,” how do they quantify that readership for
advertisers, both print and online? Industry insiders have called for a new metric to more
accurately describe a paper’s true reach. “Circulation,” they say, should be replaced
by integrated audience reach, the total number of readers of the print edition plus those
unduplicated Web readers who access the paper only online or via a mobile device. This is
not insignificant given the heavy traffic enjoyed by newspaper websites. You can learn about
the possible danger of trying to boost Web traffic in the box entitled “Attracting Readers with
Click Bait.”
Smartphones, Tablets, and e-Readers
Half of all adult Americans own at least one e-reader or tablet. In addition, 80% of all online
adults have a smartphone (Lunden, 2015). Data such as these have added to the newspaper
industry’s optimism about its digital future. As you can see in Figure 2, for example, better
than half of all smartphone and tablet users access online newspapers via apps, numbers
that grow to 86% and 79% respectively when talking only about news consumers (Data
Page, 2013b). And when they are on their devices they spend more time, visit more pages,
and return more frequently than when reading on conventional computers (Mitchell,
Rosenstiel, & Christian, 2012). “There will always be improvements in technology, but it’s
hard to beat a lightweight, portable and highly legible, multimedia-driven delivery vehicle,”
said American Society of News Editors former president Ken Paulson, speaking specifically
about tablets, “It’s a newspaper amplified” (in Johnson, 2012, p. 20).
▲ Figure 2 Percentage of Device Users and News Consumers Who Downloaded at Least
One News App.
Source: Data Page, 2013b. Photo Source: © Maskot/Getty Images RF
The industry shares Mr. Paulson’s enthusiasm. Eighty-eight percent of U.S. newspapers
make their content available for mobile devices, up from just about half in 2009, and of all
digital news readers, those who access the news solely on mobile devices now outnumber
those who access it on any other digital technology (Conaghan, 2014). In fact, some papers,
the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, for example, have begun
subsidizing their readers’ purchase of tablets. These mobile technologies are of great interest
to newspapers because they are especially attractive to young readers who otherwise have
abandoned print. In fact, when all technologies are considered, young adults rival their
parents in the amount of news they consume (Ellis, 2012).
Page 88
Access to newspapers on tablets and smartphones increased dramatically in late 2011
with the arrival of Apple’s Newsstand, a preinstalled folder on iPhones and iPads that allows
users to stock its shelves with the apps of free and subscription publications which are then
automatically delivered daily. Within a week of its introduction, the New York Times’s iPhone
app was downloaded 1.8 million times, compared to 21,000 the week before; its iPad app
was downloaded 189,000 times, a sevenfold increase over the previous week (Palser, 2011).
iPad users alone spend more than $70,000 a day on newsstand papers and magazines
(Yarow, 2012).
Changes in Newspaper Readership
Newspaper publishers know well that newspaper readership in the United States is least
prevalent among younger people. A declining number of young people reads a daily paper.
Look at Figure 3. Note the decline in newspaper readership, print and online, as the age of
each group goes from older to younger. How do you feel about the fact that so few young
people read the paper? The problem facing newspapers, then, is how to lure young people (
readers of the future) to their pages. Online and free commuter papers might be two
solutions, but the fundamental question remains: Should newspapers give these readers
what they should want or what they do want?
▲ Figure 3 Newspaper Audience by Age, 2011.
Source: Newspaper Association of America (2011).
Photo Source: © Mixa/PunchStock RF
Some newspapers confront this problem directly. They add inserts or sections directed
toward, and sometimes written by, teens and young people. This is good business. But
traditionalists disagree with another youth-targeted strategy—altering other, more serious
(presumably more important) parts of the paper to cater to the infrequent and nonnewspaper reader. As more newspaper professionals adopt a market-centered approach in
their pursuit of what media ethicist Jay Black (2001, p. 21) calls (fairly or unfairly?) the
“bifurcating, self-indulgent, highly transient, and significantly younger audiences whose
pocketbooks are larger than their attention spans”—using readership studies, focus groups,
and other tests of customer satisfaction to design their papers—they increasingly find
themselves criticized for “cheapening” both the newspaper as a medium and journalism as
an institution.
What happens to journalistic integrity, critics ask, to community service, to the traditional
role of newspapers in our democracy, when front pages are given over to reports of starlets’
affairs, sports heroes’ retirements, and full-color photos of plane wrecks because this is what
younger readers want? As topics of interest to the 18- to 35-year-old reluctant reader and
nonreader are emphasized, what is ignored? What happens to depth, detail, and precision as
stories get shorter and snappier? And this is happening, as many major news organizations
now require that their reporters keep their stories between 300 and 500 words, allowing
only 700 words for the “top two stories” they’re covering (Farhi, 2014). What kind of culture
develops on a diet of soft news (sensational stories that do not serve the democratic
function of journalism) rather than hard news (stories that help citizens to make intelligent
decisions and keep up with important issues of the day)? Molly Ivins offered a pessimistic
answer. The late columnist suggested that newspapers aren’t dying; they’re committing
suicide. “This is the most remarkable business plan,” she told Editor & Publisher. “Newspaper
owners look at one another and say, ‘Our rate of return is slipping a bit; let’s solve the
problem by making our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting’” (in Nichols,
2007, p. 14).
The “softening” of newspapers raises a potential media literacy issue. The media-literate
person has an obligation to be aware of the impact newspapers have on individuals and
society and to understand how the text of newspapers offers insight into contemporary
culture. We might ask ourselves: Are we getting what we asked for? What do we as a people
and as individuals want from our newspaper? Do we understand the role newspapers Page
89 play in our democratic process? Are we fully aware of how newspapers help shape our
understanding of ourselves and our world?
▲ Young readers have abandoned print, but their consumption of news rivals that of their
parents thanks to mobile communication devices.
© Peathegee Inc LLC/Blend Images RF
In a 1787 letter, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a colleague, “Were it left to me to decide
whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without
government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Would he write that about today’s
newspaper, a newspaper increasingly designed to meet the wants, needs, and interests of
younger, occasional newspaper readers or those who do not read at all?
There is another view, however—that there is no problem here at all. Ever since the days
of the penny press, newspapers have been dominated by soft news. All we are seeing today
is an extension of what has always been. Moreover, nonreaders are simply going elsewhere
for the hard news and information that were once the sole province of newspapers. They’re
going online, to television, and to specifically targeted sources, including magazines and
newsletters.
DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS
Interpreting Relative Placement of Stories
Newspapers tell readers what is significant and meaningful through their placement of
stories in and on their pages. Within a paper’s sections (for example, front, leisure, sports,
and careers), readers almost invariably read pages in order (that is, page 1, then page 2, and
so on). Recognizing this, papers place the stories they think are most important on the
earliest pages. Newspaper jargon for this phenomenon has even entered our everyday
language. “Front-page news” means the same thing in the living room as in the pressroom.
The placement of stories on a page is also important (Figure 4). English readers read from
top to bottom and from left to right. Stories that the Page 90 newspaper staff deems
important tend to be placed above the fold and toward the left of the page. This is an
important aspect of the power of newspapers to influence public opinion and of media
literacy. Relative story placement is a factor in agenda setting—the way newspapers and
other media influence not only what we think but also what we think about.
▲ Figure 4 Placement of Stories on a Typical Front Page.
© spxChrome/Getty Images RF
A media-literate newspaper reader should be able to make judgments about other layout
decisions. The use of photos suggests the importance the editors assign to a story, as do the
size and wording of headlines, the employment of jumps (continuations to other pages), and
placement of a story in a given section. A report of a person’s death on the front page, as
opposed to the international section or in the obituaries, carries a different meaning, as does
an analysis of an issue placed on the front page as opposed to the editorial page.
MEDIA LITERACY CHALLENGE
Reading the Newspaper: Hard Copy vs. Online vs. Mobile
Two elements of media literacy are critical thinking skills enabling the development of
independent judgments about media content and strategies for analyzing and discussing
media messages. Both are involved in this challenge.
Find the Web version of a newspaper with which you are familiar, its appenabled version for your smartphone or tablet, and its dead-tree version, all
from the same day. Compare the three. What content is common to all three?
What content exists online or on mobile technology that is unavailable in the
printed newspaper?
How would you characterize the Web-specific content? The mobile-specific
content? That is, are there specific types of content that seem to appear online
and on mobile devices as opposed to appearing in the hard-copy version? Can
you speculate why this might be?
How similar or different are the advertisers in the two electronic versions
from those in the printed version? Do the Web and mobile versions have
different advertisers? Can you speculate on why the similarities and
differences you found exist? Describe your experience reading the online and
mobile newspapers. What did you like about it? What did you dislike? Do the
same for the printed version. Despite the demographic trends that might
suggest otherwise, do you think you could ever become a regular reader of
the hard-copy newspaper? Why or why not?
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
