San Jose Mercury News employee Thuha Pham picks up a stack of advertisements for insertion into the paper. | AP Photo/Jeff Chiu Cruel summer for newspapers Publishers see their businesses circling the drain in rapidly decaying orbit

We’ve grown accustomed to a narrative about the slow and painful death of newspapers.

The Internet is pilfering readers and advertisers from print. There’s a growing army of startups and platforms to which more and more people are flocking for their headlines. Announcements of layoffs and newspaper closures are so regular they strain the standard of newsworthiness.

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This may sound like the same old story, but there’s a reason you may be getting the nagging feeling that lately, the storm clouds are getting darker. New York Times CEO Mark Thompson neatly summed up the current mood in a “Game of Thrones”-inspired essay in last week’s 2016 Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute: “Winter really is coming for many of the world’s news publishers.”

The past few weeks alone have produced no fewer than five studies broadcasting bleak statistics and ominous outlooks for newspapers, with some rays of light about the industry’s march toward innovation mixed in.

One of these, The Pew Research Center’s 2016 State of the News Media report, declared that U.S. newspapers had just seen their “worst year since the recession and its immediate aftermath.” Another, from PwC, described “a steady pattern of structural decline that is expected to continue over the next few years,” with $2.3 billion in lost revenue between 2011 and 2015, and an estimated $800 million hemorrhaged last year alone. Gallup, meanwhile, found that Americans’ confidence in newspapers has “hit an all time low.”

These statistical downers seem to amplify some of the reports coming out of America’s most venerable newspaper companies.

Tribune Publishing, which includes The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, has been caught between a hostile takeover attempt and a fanciful turnaround plan as the company’s stock price continues to tumble and its journalists grapple with depleted resources and morale. The New York Times is in the midst of an all-too-familiar cost-saving exercise as it once again evaluates how to realign its newsroom in a way that puts more energy into digital initiatives while ensuring the print edition stays robust.

At the same time, there’s a wave of consolidation washing over the U.S., with behemoths like Gannett and Digital First Media leading the charge as newspapers “gobble up one another to survive [the] digital apocalypse,” to borrow a March 29 Bloomberg headline.

Things are no less turbulent in the U.K., where newspapers have seen a sharp downturn in print advertising this year. Job cuts have wracked The Guardian and The Telegraph, while The Independent recently shut down its print edition and is now trying to reinvent itself as an online player. “Fleet Street is being sunk by the Internet,” John Gapper declared last month in The Financial Times, which in April acknowledged its own “tough times” despite the lucrative subscription model underpinning its business.

A new generation of digital-first news organizations has sprung up in the last decade to fill the void as the budgets of traditional outlets have waned. But while these emerging players are unburdened by the legacy costs that are making things so difficult for many of their print progenitors, there’s still a question of whether enough of them can survive long-term, let alone have the willingness to sustain the level of investment required to fund the type of time-consuming, resource-intensive newsgathering that has traditionally been the bread and butter of newspaper companies.

Interviews with prominent industry figures elicited various reactions to the latest hints of apocalypse. But overall there’s a sense that just as the industry was starting to find its footing in the new digital ecosystem, the ground shifted again.

"The runway and timeline for transformation has certainly gotten shorter,” said Financial Times CEO John Ridding, though he pointed out that the FT's success with digital subscriptions—they're now 75 percent of total circulation—gave him "confidence" in its long-term prospects.

“A double blow of macro pressures and another acceleration of structural change have hit advertising for news organizations," he said. "We are taking share, but the overall pie is clearly shrinking rapidly. Economic weakness, new political risks, along with the rapid rise of social media and other platforms as news sources have all been factors.”

Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who’s working on a book about the digital disruption of journalism, put it down to the fact that “readers and viewers moved so quickly to absorbing their news on mobile, a development that has further flattened digital revenues. This is frustrating because some of the most inventive and deep accountability work is being done and needs to be supported.”



AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

Over the past year to 18 months or so, the preference for reading news on smartphones has exploded, giving more power to social platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, which itself exposes such an astronomical number of readers to newspaper content that publishers are willing to host their journalism directly on Facebook in exchange for audience growth and bonus revenue from ads sold. (Facebook and Google combined, by the way, accounted for 76 percent of digital advertising growth last year.)

The conundrum is that publishers are still having trouble figuring out how to make money on their mobile platforms, which have been besieged by the fast rise of ad-blocking software, an issue that has been heating up in recent weeks.

“There have been three strikes, all unexpected — the rapid move to mobile, the rapid move to social and the extraordinary increase in ad-blocking — and the combination of them is truly shocking,” said Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher who now advises media companies on digital strategy. “This is as bad a time for traditional news publishers as any.”

Which is not to say there isn’t optimism.

PwC’s latest global media outlook, released on June 8, noted that, as more newspapers have begun trying their hands at the paid digital models that have proven successful for the likes of stalwarts like the Journal and Times, digital circulation revenue “has grown fast” and is expected to surpass $1 billion in 2020, up from $188 million in 2011. Pew’s State of the Media report described “momentum … around experimentation with new digital approaches.”

Rick Edmonds, a media analyst at Florida’s Poynter Institute, said that while there are “fresh grounds for gloom and doom,” his view “continues to be that the digital transformation has many more years to play out. The body of good practices”—online subscriptions, digital marketing services, events—“that generate some new revenue is growing, albeit slowly.”

Raju Narisetti, senior vice president of strategy for News Corp., whose publications include The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London, pointed out that the recent “flight to fear over the fate of newspapers conveniently forgets the futility of many digital-only news brands also struggling for a fixed future.”

At the same time, he sounded a note of caution about the “influence of supposedly neutral social platforms,” without naming any names.

“We have to have a willingness and resolve to not mortgage our future for the latest 'new-new' seductive feature dangled as a come-hither by those who have no desire to pay for the creation and sustenance of vital journalism,” said Narisetti.

“There was once a time, not too far back, at newspapers when just having great content and a great audience was enough. Today, we still have great journalism and we still have great—and growing—audiences, relatively speaking. But that is clearly not enough.”

