A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

 By Jim Friedlich

“Weaning our remaining great American newspapers from paper is a multi-year process, part art and part science.”

Among the safest predictions one could make over the past decade-plus is that “next year” will be another abysmal one for the business of local newspapers. The story never seems to change: Newsroom staffs are cut, print circulation declines, print advertising plummets, and digital ad revenue doesn’t amount to much. Rinse and repeat.

But let’s look at the flip side: In most American cities and towns, the flagship newspaper remains far and away the largest provider of quality, independent, public-service journalism. Despite their challenges, these news enterprises still typically maintain the biggest news teams and the deepest capacity for investigative reporting to serve their communities.

Perhaps most importantly, in many key markets — Seattle, Minneapolis, Dallas, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia — daily newspapers have the largest share of digital users of any local media outlet, including TV and radio. Indeed, nimble young digital startups have so far struggled to achieve anything close to the online audience scale of their historically print competitors. For many newspapers, this audience lead has widened during the Covid-19 crisis as readers have turned to trusted, familiar brands for reliable news.

Newspapers shoulder a number of burdens — particularly the cost of printing and distributing the dead-tree versions of their news. The Catch-22 has always been that their remaining print subscribers still pay good money for their beloved morning deliveries. The question newspaper owners and executives have been asking privately for years is how to jettison print costs while retaining their still-substantial subscriber revenues.

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