From ink to electrons: the retirement of print journalism

Recently, a retired friend asked if I planned to retire anytime soon. It was the right question. While I have considered retirement, I explained, I have no real plans — soon or otherwise — to do so.

But, I added, “The choice may not be up to me because I’m in a profession that might retire on me.”

It’s no joke.

In the last year alone, two newspapers that had long published this weekly effort closed and two others quit printing it — after nearly 25 years — due to bone-deep budget cuts. That’s just the state of today’s newspapers.

According to research at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, 360 U.S. newspapers closed from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic through mid-2022.

If that shutdown rate continued through this January, roughly another 150 have closed since — which means nearly 3,000 newspapers, one-fourth of all U.S. newspapers, have closed since 2005.

That clobbering has made print journalists nearly as rare as coal miners. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people employed by U.S. newspapers dropped from 71,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020.

That freefall was just slightly better than coal mining that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, lost 46,000 jobs since 2012.

We inky wretches aren’t the only word shakers quaking. Digital and print magazine editors are keeping their heads low in their office cubicles, too.

For example, wrote Ezra Klein in the Jan. 21 New York Times, in the last few months “Sports Illustrated has just laid off most of its staff,” and web news giants BuzzFeed and Jezebel closed while HuffPo, Vice and FiveThirtyEight pared back staff and reach.

And all continue to lose readers, advertising and revenue. The only thing all forms of journalism seems good at nowadays is bleeding money.

Ideas to stem the flow are many, varied and cheap. Actual solutions are rare, hard and costly.

A decade ago the best one appeared to be white knight billionaires wanting to owntrophy pieces of American journalism.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Washington Post), biotech investor Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times) and software mogul Marc Benioff (Time) spent a collective $940 million to acquire their shiny jewels.

By mid-January 2024, though, those Midases were taking a pasting, too. According to the Times, the three had poured hundreds of millions more into their inky ratholes before putting their checkbooks back into their pockets.

Even newspaper royalty isn’t immune: On Feb. 1 Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal laid off 20 journalists in its Washington, D.C. bureau.

“Wealth doesn’t insulate an owner from the serious challenges plaguing many media companies,” one long-time observer told the Times, “and it turns out being a billionaire isn’t a predictor for solving those problems.”

The problem is particularly acute in rural America, noted Northwestern’s Nov. 16, 2023 “The State of Local News” Report.

“Residents in more than half of U.S. counties have no, or very limited, access to a reliable local news source — either print, digital or broadcast,” it explained.

Moreover, “there are 204 counties without any local news outlet and 1,562 counties served with only one remaining local news source, invariably a weekly newspaper.”

And new digital alternatives — regardless of professionalism or earnestness — aren’t a universal solution because “many digital start-ups have trouble gaining enough subscribers and funding to achieve long-term sustainability,” the report adds.

That doesn’t mean newspapers can’t make the move to digital. Many have and more are headed that way.

A year ago, the report noted, “42 of the largest 100 newspapers (delivered) a print edition six or fewer times a week” and 11 of those “largest dailies publish in printed form only one or two times a week.”

That future — less ink, more electrons and fewer journalists — appears as irreversible as my age.