[karlkatzke]

I worked in journalism at the tail end of the local paper era. My first degree is actually an associate’s in journalism and I won several state-level awards for journalism in college in the late 90s. (In fact, my two year college paper swept our category the two years I was there.) Out of the twenty or so people on that staff, all of us started with paying jobs in journalism, but only two of us now work in anything even related to that field, and those two people are in marketing.

Most of us got into the field we’d studied for and were immediately run out because we were (cheap) liberal 22 year olds that wanted to write about millennial social justice, our editors and owners wanted to run as many ads as possible at the lowest price point, and our readers were generally older than our parents and wanted to feel something that validated their feelings that the world was going to hell but wouldn’t pay even the cost of paper for a subscription.

Since this situation didn’t meet anyone’s needs at the price point they were willing to pay, what’s left for information sharing now that we’re all too far spread out for a pub is Nextdoor.

[wahern]

I wonder what the effect of CNN and then Fox News was on paper subscriptions during the 1990s. Wikipedia shows that revenue peaked in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#/media/F... But it looks like circulation began it's decline in 1990: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation... Especially with subscriptions declining, I can absolutely imagine newspapers using every trick in the book to keep revenues increasing, until one day they were out of tricks, which ultimately had the effect of accelerating their demise for having cheapened their product.

EDIT: Weird. The Pew revenue graph site (below the circulation graph) has the same shape as the Wikipedia revenue graph, but seems to be shifted later by 6+ years. The Wikipedia numbers are inflation adjusted, so I'm guessing the Pew graph isn't adjusted?