There's a successful business in there, just a much smaller one. In many ways, it's a return to the start of newspapers.
Well, here in Europe you're empirically being shown wrong. Local newspapers disappear the first; first step is that they're bought by a larger entity, second step is the removal of local news from them (because too expensive to write up), third step is killing them. Then, after a large brand has killed several smaller ones, they get bought by a bigger entity or go bankrupt.
I'm not sure how you can say that producing a local news story is cheap. It's very expensive on a per-reader count (which is all that matter) because there are relatively few readers. If you write a national story, you can sell it to everybody in the country. If you write a local story, you can only sell it to a subset of those people. Writing about a bake off costs the same as writing about a political debate on a national topic. It's quite obvious that writing for a small audience is a lot harder to have a positive ROI than for a large audience.
(Snark aside, it's a good point-- there must be similar graphs for the ice or telegram industries, to name two. Could make a pretty cool art installation or something.)
If you ask me now, I'd say "Totally toast. Your children may recognize the names of a couple of them, if they happen to regularly visit one of a handful of niche websites."
Pick an industry you might think the US has largely abandoned to cheap foreign competition, like say textile manufacturing. Think all of our clothes are made in China? I'll bet you the US' textile manufacturing revenues graph looks substantially more favorable than that.
In fact, if you look at the curve from 1950-2000 you see it seems to approximately track the population growth from 1950, with a weird peak in ~1990 and trough a few years later. My hunch is that the previous state of the industry was that it reliably took in ~$130/yr/US resident (again, in current dollars) year after year. Now it takes in less than half that, and it's plummeting.
The romance of the paper is just that. A thing of fiction, because in reality it is just voluntarily delivered spam.
I know it's not exactly comparing apples to apples, but Private Eye in the UK still sells pretty well. I'm sure that if a newspaper marketed itself as high-brow, intellectual and most of all critical of itself and its own standards a lot of people would flock to it, as well as advertisers.
SFgate.com, I am looking at you.
The 1950's seem to me like they would be a high point for newspapers (every book and movie set in those years has newspapers quite prominently, and wikipedia says that papers per person peaked in 1950). The years after that look like outliers actually, and now things are simply returning to normal.
But to make a true examination I would really like to see a graph going further back (to 1900, and even better to 1850), and I would like to see a graph adjusted per capita (per household, not person).
And although the rate of decline seems to be decreasing, it looks like they still haven't hit rock bottom yet. There's more pain to come.
http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/06/02/whats-killing-the-newspa...
The main source of revenue for newspapers isn't cover prices or even display advertising. It's classifieds. Until the internet came along, your local newspaper had a guaranteed cut of thousands of little transactions every single week.
Then craigslist and ebay and real estate websites and car sites and all their ilk proliferated. Now I can, often for free, advertise something small. That sucks the single biggest source of revenue directly out of newspapers.
And yes, I'm still working on that startup.
