This paper examines the accelerating decline of print newspapers in the face of online news editions. Drawing on media scholars including Pablo Boczkowski and Xigen Li, the paper traces how the Internet's interactivity, hypertext capability, real-time content delivery, and user segmentation have made print formats seem increasingly obsolete. It also analyzes the sharp drop in advertising revenues on both sides of the Atlantic, considers the role of reader-generated content, and evaluates arguments about whether robust newspaper-reading cultures — particularly in the U.K. — can slow the shift away from print. The paper concludes that print newspapers face a long-term viability crisis as readers migrate to free online alternatives.
The paper effectively synthesizes multiple scholarly sources — Boczkowski, Xigen Li, Gibbons and Hiebert — alongside trade press commentary to build a multi-layered argument. Rather than simply summarizing each source, the author integrates them into a coherent narrative about technological disruption, using each citation to advance a specific claim about why print is losing ground to online formats.
The essay moves from a macro-level historical overview of print profitability, through a detailed analysis of the Internet's structural advantages, then into specific industry case studies (New Jersey Online, the Los Angeles Times, U.K. dailies), and finally to a forward-looking conclusion about the survival of print. This funnel structure — broad context narrowing to specific evidence and then projecting forward — is characteristic of effective media studies argumentation at the undergraduate level.
Is the printed newspaper dead? Over the course of the twentieth century, newspapers "exhibited profit margins higher than most industrial sectors" and enjoyed "the largest share of advertising expenditures of all media" (Boczkowski 3). Having a page-length advertisement in the New York Times was considered the best way to reach a mass audience — or at least a mass audience with considerable spending power. But in the twenty-first century, numerous postmortems have been written about print newspapers. The medium has rapidly deteriorated in terms of healthy sales revenues since "the Internet burst on the scene as an entirely new mass medium" (Gibbons & Hiebert 1999, p. 306). Advertising revenues for American newspapers shrank by 14% in the first three months of 2008, and the Los Angeles Times "announced that 250 jobs were going — 150 of them in [the] editorial [department]" (Snoddy 2008, p. 18).
Of course, long before the Internet, changes in technology have altered the way information is received since the very inception of mass communication. However, with startling speed, the Internet has made print newspapers seem irrelevant because of print's lack of interactive capability, its slow pace of generating content compared with the web, and because online newspapers often offer more attractive user features than their print counterparts. It seems likely that print newspapers, if they continue to exist at all, will largely go the way of coffee table books — perhaps subscriptions will be given as gifts or offered as a perk at high-end hotels and offices. The medium of print news seems increasingly irrelevant compared to other media, and even compared with newspapers' own online formats.
The Internet itself "more closely replicates the thought processes of the human brain than any other technology" — it is discursive and less linear than previous media formats, and thus entirely alters the way news is experienced (Gibbons & Hiebert 1999, p. 315). Although many print newspapers have online editions that closely resemble their physical counterparts, even reading the New York Times online is a profoundly different and more enriching, personalized experience. It enables quicker access to breaking news and to content specifically of interest to the user. For example, someone researching a stock can check that stock's price in real time and search its coverage in the business media over the past several months or years. A user with a particular political bias can likewise segment his or her viewing content, searching only for articles or editorials he or she agrees with — there is no need to page through a physical newspaper.
Greater segmentation benefits both readers and advertisers, and could theoretically help newspapers sell additional advertising across multiple sections of their websites. The New York Times, for example, can publish the same article in both a "health" section and a "business" section while including two different sets of targeted advertisements for the likely users of each. However, the proliferation of advertising spaces across a variety of online newspapers also means that although some papers "have more readers than at any time in [their] history" thanks to the web, "advertisers have more choice" as to where to place their advertisements — a dynamic that has translated into less revenue for newspapers over the past several years as content has shifted online (Snoddy 2008, p. 18).
The Internet is about "space, time, and choice," because the user does not have to proceed through a page or informational space in a linear fashion. A reader can quickly click a hyperlink to jump from an article to the referenced website itself, and can carefully tailor his or her content to be as narrow or broad, as partisan or objective, as desired (Gibbons & Hiebert 1999, p. 315). There is, of course, a concern here: many fear that this kind of online news-reading will lead to greater "social fragmentation" because of content segmentation (Boczkowski 2005, p. 2). Additionally, the line between advertisement and news may be blurred online more than in print — when a reader follows a newspaper's hyperlink to an outside website, the boundary between editorial content and promotional material can become unclear, something that cannot occur in print. Nevertheless, the ease and convenience of the online format makes printed newspapers seem comparatively clumsy and time-consuming.
U.K. newspapers have nonetheless begun offering web-only features such as hyperlinks to outside sites and columnist blogs, mirroring their American counterparts. And perhaps most convincingly in support of the shift to an online format, increased web readership in the U.K. has already led to decreased print readership and falling advertising revenues: "The hard figures show that ad expenditure is down from £2.25bn in 2000 to £1.93bn by the end of last year — a fall of 17%. Not quite up to U.S. standards of catastrophe, but a loss of ad share from 14.7% to 10.5%. The one big similarity between the Los Angeles Times and the British quality dailies is that both have millions of online readers but hardly any money earned as a result" (Snoddy 2008, p. 18).
The enhanced content and features found online, combined with its greater affordability, may mean that print newspapers will not generate enough revenue to stay afloat as readers migrate to free online versions. This is one reason why the death of the newspaper — first as a paper medium and then potentially in its online version if costs cannot be covered — may be on the horizon, if not imminent. The trajectory of both U.S. and U.K. advertising data, alongside the structural advantages the Internet holds over print in terms of interactivity, personalization, and real-time delivery, suggests that print newspapers face a serious and perhaps irreversible long-term viability crisis.
Boczkowski, Pablo. (2005). Digitizing the News. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gibbons, Sheila & Ray E. Hiebert. (1999). Exploring Mass Media for a Changing World. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gunter, Barrie. (2003). News and the Net. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Snoddy, Raymond. (2008, July 9). Papers must heed web's death threat. Marketing. Retrieved 29 Sept 2008 at
Xigen, Li. (2006). Internet Newspapers: The Making of a Mainstream Medium. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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