THE STATE OF PRINT IS NUANCED, CONTINUES TO MORPH
(EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an opinion/analysis piece on print journalism)
In the mid-1980s, I was a reporter at The Kansas City Star when an editor returned to the bureau from a national newspaper conference. He had a mind-blowing revelation for me and the other half-dozen reporters covering suburban news in that area: in our lifetimes, news consumers would cease reading the stories we created in printed newspapers and would, instead, read them on a computer screen.
We were stunned. And no wonder. Computers were in their infancy. The Star already had traded typewriters for clunky word processors on which reporters composed stories. The wordsmiths laboring in the bureaus during the 1980s typed our stories using word processors, then transmitted them through the telephone lines, much like sending a fax, to the headquarters at 18th and Grand, where copyeditors and typesetters would work their magic.
At the time, we had never envisioned email, the world wide web or any of the flurry of technology that would forever change our industry.
While the editors at that conference rightly predicted the core components of print’s future, they never could have imagined the blunt force trauma that awaited the industry—the downward spiral that would lead to the sale of many outlets to media conglomerates that would purchase publications and reduce them to bare bones staff before selling them to another conglomerate that would do the same.
Eventually, many of those newspapers would be sold to a group that finally shuttered the news organization. “Since 2004, 1,800 local print outlets have shuttered in the United States, and at least 200 counties have no newspaper at all,” writes NiemanLab in its online “Predictions for Journalism 2021.”
In addition, the early days of online newspaper sources saw newsroom leaders offering online readership for free since they were saving money on ink, paper, and production costs, according to a story in the online Britannica. However, many newsroom executives now realize the lost revenue by free readership and now charge online subscribers.
No one could better describe the grim news and subsequent fallout than industry leaders at one of the nation’s top journalism schools—the University of Missouri. “Democracy has always relied on independent journalism to provide citizens with accurate information and to hold the powerful accountable,” stated a message from Knight Media Forum 2023, promoting an upcoming conference on the subject.