Conventional wisdom has, for decades now, written off the daily newspaper business as the buggy-whip maker of the Twenty-First Century. And indeed, the dramatic changes and declining fortunes of the newspaper industry have reinforced that perception. There’s even an article on Wikipedia: “Decline of Newspapers.” On the other hand, news publishers are not ready to concede defeat, especially when the Internet has created new ways to commodify information.

Let’s look at the data that has, until recently, backed up the pessimistic view. Take a look at newspaper circulation:

That’s a misleading graph. The circulation goes from 30 million to 65 million, although it should go from 0 to 65 million. Even so, a drop from 63 million to 35 million — that’s a 44% decline — is a huge deal. Also, it may be misleading in that there is no data yet on 2017, and media reports suggest we may see an uptick, or at least a slower decline, in 2017.

Let’s look at the total number of newspapers in the United States:

This one is misleading too, in the same ways, and it only goes up to 2014. Still, a 24% decline in total number of newspapers since 1981 is not a sign of growth. Well, let me qualify that. Over the same time span, we’ve seen huge declines in the numbers of department stores; but we have Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon picking up the slack. Same story with local hardware stores, home improvement centers, and lawn and garden retailers; again, Home Depot and Lowes are taking their place. The key here is revenue: home improvement retailing has not seen plummeting revenue. Newspapers? Well, take a look:

Now that’s old data, ending at 2014. Here’s some more recent data from Pew, with estimates for the last few years:

Circulation revenue, which includes both newsstand sales and subscriptions, has a flat-to-slightly-up trendline, but the precipitous drop in ad revenue shows no sign of abating. If revenue had been growing overall with declining numbers of papers, then one could assume that consolidated larger papers were taking over from the myriad smaller papers that were going under or being acquired. But that’s not what we see. Instead, newspaper circulation, total numbers, and total revenue are all sinking in tandem. That’s a sign that the industry is imploding, and that former newspaper readers are simply not being served or are getting their information needs met elsewhere.

However — and perhaps paradoxically — newspapers continue to command a huge amount of respect among information seekers. The percentage of adult Americans who say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers has held steady for years:

Moreover, customers remain very willing to subscribe to newspapers, especially compared with other media that distribute information:

So take an uptick in subscription revenue, a high level of confidence and trust, and a longtime habit of subscribing to newspapers, and maybe, just maybe, you have a path that leads forward for newspapers; that’s why some pundits are looking to subscriptions as perhaps the best way to keep newspapers afloat. And reporters have been pointing in recent months to an uptick in digital subscriptions as supporting evidence for that position. Last December, for example, Laurel Wamsley reported that “Big Newspapers Are Booming.” In February, Ron Miller at DCN wrote “Media companies lured by the promise of subscription revenue.” In July, the New York Times reported that for the first time, its own digital-only subscription revenue ($83 million) exceeded print advertising revenue ($77 million).

Tien Tzuo at TechCrunch explained “Why newspaper subscriptions are on the rise” —

• 70% of Americans read a newspaper once a month.
• The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times have seen digital subscriptions rise.
• People hate ads. More than 80 million Americans will use ad blockers this year. That means people will pay for an ad-free subscription.

Lucia Moses at DigiDay took a deep look at how the Washington Post has managed to grow digital subscriptions by 145%:

• Distributing its journalism to as wide an audience as possible, through social media.
• Making a big push with email newsletters as loyalty tools.
• Putting up its metered gate for articles that used to be freely readable from newsletters and social media.
• Adding articles to its meter for users who give their email addresses, moving them a step along the engagement funnel.

The trendline shows that most newspapers are finally biting the bullet and taking digital subscription seriously:

It’s not just the biggest newspapers who are at least trying to jump on the digital subscription trend. In fact, smaller newspapers are more likely to be trying a digital strategy:

When 86% of the smallest papers are going digital compared with only 64% of the biggest, well, you can’t say the little guys are not trying.

Trying … sure … but as a wise Muppet once said, there is no try, only do. Will newspapers do well? What does the future hold? I’m no oracle, but when I look at the data, I find myself skeptical. So does CNN’s Chris Cillizza, as he writes in a column titled “2 very depressing charts about the future of newspapers“:

• If you look at the trend line since 1990 — the peak of newspaper circulation — it’s hard to see it reversing itself … The economics of keeping a full staff at many smaller newspapers have become untenable. Less people covering the news + less people reading what it written = bad news for newspapers and for the public.

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson’s piece on “The Print Apocalypse” suggests that publishers will have to turn the clock back nearly 200 years to find a viable business model:

• Where do newspapers go from here? Back to readers, perhaps. In 2000, circulation accounted 26 percent of the New York Times’ revenue. … Today circulation is 60 percent of the company and growing. … This future of the newspaper business would serve as a corrective, returning the industry to its distant past. In Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants, he tells the story of the dawn of newspaper advertising. In the 1830s, the largest newspaper in New York City had a circulation of only 2,600, at a price of 6 cents, making it a luxury product for its time.

Thompson says that reliance on subscription was replaced, after the launch of the New York Sun in 1833, with the use of readers as an audience to attract ads. That model lasted for 150+ years, but now it is time to return to subscriber roots.

The problem, Thompson points out, is that local and state news looks like a dead end, as readers focus on big national stories — and publishers are happy to focus on the national picture, because national news has a huge audience and local news has a very small audience.

There are certainly opposing points of view. Business Insider reports that local news media company Patch is doing just fine, thank you very much.

• As of September 2017, the company marked 15 straight months of profitability. Patch has 148 full-time employees, including 34 new reporters hired this year. … The Patch audience has more than tripled in size since 2014, and Patch has expanded into more than 200 new markets. … Patch began 2017 with 20 million unique visitors per month, and has now increased to 27.5 million.

And more generally, Sami Edge at MediaShift looks at old and anecdotal data to suggest that some local papers have found a way to survive. And I’m sure that some will … but how many?

Insider Take

The numeric trends for daily newspaper circulation and revenue are, frankly, nightmarish. Still, new data suggest that subscription-dominant business models may offer a survival path for some news publishers. I’m not optimistic in general, however, and even though some daily newspapers will surely survive, the continuing shake-out will not be pretty.