by Joe Miller
An estimated 50 million Americans live in areas with limited or no access to local news.
That statistic comes from Northwestern University’s latest Medill State of Local News report. Researchers found that 212 counties have no local news source, and another 1,525 have just a single source.
It’s pretty well understood at this point that the rise of the internet did serious damage to print media.
Northwestern’s reports go back only to 2005 – well after print media began its decline – but the numbers have worsened dramatically since. Only 60 counties lacked a news source in the report’s initial baseline.
If you ask most journalists to explain how the internet pulled the rug out from under traditional journalism, the chances are that they will point to big tech companies. Google started answering more and more questions directly from its search results page, cutting down the number of people who visited websites.
And Facebook – once the main source of traffic to news websites – started penalizing content that included off-site links, effectively hiding those posts. Later it deprioritized organic posts entirely, filling users’ feeds with paid promotional posts.
Today, Pew Research reports that around 54% of all Americans get news directly from social media. Some polls find that as many as 85% of Americans under 50 get their news from social media.
“Why,” the argument goes, “would anyone continue to pay for the news when they can just go read the article for free on social media?”
It seems like a pretty reasonable argument. It’s certainly true that not many people are willing to pay for news anymore and it’s also true that you can get all the news you want in just a few minutes on social media.
But I’m not convinced by the argument, for two related reasons. The collapse in print journalism started before social media became ubiquitous and even in the heyday of print journalism, readers weren’t paying for the news.
Newspapers were extremely profitable for a while. The New York Times made so much money that it briefly owned a share of (gasp!) the Boston Red Sox.
But that revenue wasn’t coming from people buying copies of the paper. It was coming from companies buying ads in the paper. At its peak, every dollar the Times brought in from selling a newspaper, it took in $4.60 in ad revenue.
Newspapers weren’t selling the news to their subscribers. They were selling their subscribers’ attention to advertisers.
The internet didn’t break print journalism by distributing news for free. It broke print journalism by being a more effective and efficient way of selling advertisements.
For local newspapers, the major source of ad revenue was the classified ad. Industrywide, classified ad sales peaked at $19.6 billion in 2000. By 2012, classified ad revenue had fallen to just $4.6 billion – a 77% de$4.6 billion – a 77% decline.
It wasn’t Google or Facebook that killed classified advertising. It was Craigslist, the company that made it free for just about everyone to post an ad.
As classified ads moved to Craigslist, newspapers compensated by raising subscription rates. Higher prices caused more readers to cancel, and since advertising rates are largely a function of circulation (the more subscribers, the higher the ad rates), non-classified advertising revenue fell as well.
Losing classified ads to Craigslist effectively undermined the entire economic infrastructure on which print journalism was built.
News organizations that were more heavily reliant on classified ads – local town newspapers like the Moundsville Daily Echo, which ceased print operations in 2024 and regional newspapers like the Charleston Daily Mail, which merged with the Charleston Gazette in 2015 – were among the hardest hit.
Obviously, I believe in the importance of local newspapers. I wouldn’t be writing this column if I didn’t.
Unfortunately, I think that many of the efforts to save local news sources ends up somewhat half-baked, in large part because so many print journalists believe that newspapers are in the business of selling news.
The old world of advertiser-supported journalism is (mostly) gone. I was working as a journalist when Denver’s Rocky Mountain News ceased operations in 2009. It was shocking that a major metro daily newspaper could go out of business.
These days, it’s so common that, if I’m being perfectly honest, I barely even registered when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shut down in May.
I’d like to end this column on a hopeful note, but, alas, I’m not sure I have one. If it is to survive, local news will need a brand-new business model—one that’s not reliant upon advertising revenue.
If we can’t find such a model, the list of newspapers that close after 100+ years of publication is going to get even longer.
