I don't think the data backs your claim. Sure, maybe in the 2000s after the internet began to dent its model it became a hotel paper, but in its heyday (the 80s and 90s) it was very popular option from newsstands (I'm old enough to remember dropping 50 cents for a copy).
Back in the day, it was common for people to grab their favorite local paper and a USA Today. USA Today was great at national coverage of sports which apparently drove newspaper sales.
USA Today has the highest circulation in traditional newspapers. Not really sure why that is, but my guess would be that they have some enduring relationships with hotel/motel chains. It's definitely a brand that resonates.
Depending on the town you are in, USA Today could be bigger than the local paper, and maybe have better national and international coverage. That was sometimes the case in my peak traveling days 35 years ago, when the newspapers generally were in better shape.
I recall that years ago, USA Today was sort of intended to be a "generic national newspaper". It made sense for places like 'delivery to hotel rooms' where the audience wanted a general national/global news product, but didn't need the 50% of the paper that was local school board meetings and classified ads.
With that principle, I always figured that the endgame of the Gannet company would be to make their local papers USA Today with a small local supplement folded in.
Maybe the same applies online-- you'll buy usatoday.com for national news, and also subscribe to a local rag. Over time, the local papers may scale back the national/global/wire service stuff.
The father of a friend of mine from college sells software that newspapers use to do their layouts as well as the printers that make the papers. His customers include the very large newspapers across the US as well as the smaller local papers.
My friend told me in 1999/2000 that his father had declining sales. More and more papers were either not buying the next version, putting off purchasing decisions, or simply going out of business or consolidating.
So the 1999-2000 time frame is obviously not pre-internet. But I think there are other factors besides people reading the newspaper on the internet instead of buying a print version.
I canceled my subscription because the delivery person couldn't get it to my front door. Sometimes the paper landed on the roof of my house. Sometimes he put it in the snow in front of my house. Other times it simply got rained on.
I also think the custom of reading the daily paper is going away. People aren't just reading the paper online instead of in print. They are watching the 6pm news instead of reading the print paper. Maybe even more people aren't doing that.
Smaller/local papers also make extra money on the side through print contracts -- USA Today pays the local paper to print USA Today for distribution in that area.
When I studied journalism in the early '90s our professors drew a direct correlation between newspapers that showed ads "above the fold" and those that didn't. According to the profs if they practiced the former they were clearly not real journalistic enterprises. USA Today did it and they used it as a case that proved their point. How times change.
The problem most newspapers face is that they have to compete with the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and none of them can. (And USA TODAY has always been garbage, long before the internet.)
The only categories in which my local paper can compete and win in are local high school sports, local politics and local crime reporting. And that's not much of a business model.
It is very simple why people don’t pay for News much anymore: bias, blatant bias, and damn lies.
Used to be utilitarian to buy a printed newspaper. Sidenote: I was a Detroit Free Press delivery boy with the largest subscription in my town; 325 daily (2 hours), 982 Sundays (4.5 hours) for a grand ol’ $325/month in 1970s US dollars)
Useful things like weather, comic, local events, and classified carried the printed stories for these prints.
I wonder how much of pre-internet newspaper readership was really attributable to people just using the newspaper as a convenient source for mundane information: stock quotes, sports scores, weather, traffic, movie times, etc.
If newspapers do still provide the highest-quality journalism, despite no longer being the most convenient sources of mundane information, but the end result is that newspapers can no longer sustain their business model, then the value of journalism may be grossly inflated.
If few people actually want newspapers, it's not a significant problem if they go away.
I have a family member who still gets the paper and I swear it's better than the online equivalent. The layout is better, and the ads are actually useful, in the sense that they are placed with the understanding that "someone looking at this content might also be interested in this", and nothing is popping up or stealing clicks.
My sense is newspapers have been totally lost in the internet era for some reason, and never figured out the basic "provide these services in this way and be nice to customers." I think these problems then trickled back to some extent with the paper versions too.
There's entire content categories (local event calendars for instance) that have essentially vanished locally in the way they used to be there.
I think it's possible to run a news organization well and my guess is there are some out there being run well but I don't think it's just your age.
That's interesting. I can't find a picture of a paper USA Today with an actual advert front page, above the fold. They do put little gossipy teaser type "boxes" there that I guess could be considered "ads" to read a story in their Celebrity section. But no actual advertisement for some 3rd party product or service. Not saying that didn't happen, but it's at least not easy to find.
Interestingly, at least for a while (and maybe still in some papers) Gannet used to do the opposite -- they would tuck in a condensed version of "USA Today" into the local papers they owned.
I want to believe that, but I have a hard time proving it to myself. Growing up, I loved to read the paper. Without cable or Internet, it was the best information source I had available.
However, when I visit home & look at the local paper now, I find it pointless. The "news" is outdated & rarely as in-depth as what I can find online. Classifieds? I'm more likely to find what I want online, if not with Craigslist, with Ebay & Amazon. Opinion & perspective? Nothing really insightful. In fact, I don't think we'd lose anything if the local reporters simply became online bloggers. Likewise, local stories & the rest. I can get a richer set simply looking at local bloggers. They don't really do investigative reporting. So that leaves local sports. But does my high school football team really need a newspaper solely because of it? In the end, I realized that my local paper of old was an unconfigurable RSS reader & not a very good one as that.
Well, the newspaper has been in trouble for a lot longer than the internet has been mainstream. There was a huge wave of consolidation in the 70s and 80s, remember. Also remember that most newspaper revenue used to come from classifieds. More importantly, most of the readers came for things other than hard news: sports, stock tickers, astrology, comics, etc.
It real sucks to say this so bluntly, as my wife and many friends are journalists, but "real" journalism is, and always has been, a kind of prestige side-show -- like Honda's racing team or Microsoft Research.
Back in the day, it was common for people to grab their favorite local paper and a USA Today. USA Today was great at national coverage of sports which apparently drove newspaper sales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Today#History
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