Washington (AFP) - The US newspaper industry has shed more than half its jobs since 1990, losses which have only been partly offset by gains in online media.

Official US Labor Department data showed the newspaper sector lost 271,800 jobs in the period from January 1990 to March 2016, or 59.7 percent of the total over the past 26 years.

The numbers, first cited in a report by the news website Engadget, confirm the massive shift to digital media that has hammered traditional newspapers.

Magazines fared only slightly better, losing 36 percent of their jobs in the same period.

Employment in Internet publishing and broadcasting, meanwhile, rose from about 30,000 to nearly 198,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed.

The growth in digital has coincided with a drop of some 27 percent of the jobs in radio, according to the figures.

But motion picture employment grew nearly 162 percent to 239,000, according to the report released last week.

The latest statistics come against a backdrop of a troubled print media industry marked by shutdowns of newspapers and sharp declines in circulation and advertising revenue.