This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Statistical confirmation from the United States adds to the points about the collapse of newspapers I made in two recent postings: “Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall” and “Mass media is over”.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued data for media employment trends over the 26-year period from 1990 onwards. In other words, from the dawn of the internet age until now.

The stand-out figure is the one showing the steep decline in newspaper jobs, down from nearly 458,000 in 1990 to about 183,000 in March 2016, a fall of almost 60%.

Over the same period, employment in internet publishing and online broadcasting rose from about 30,000 to nearly 198,000. As you can see from the chart, internet-related work has enjoyed a noticeably rapid rise since 2008, when the job total was 80,000.

It has risen above newspaper employment and is heading towards the 240,000 total of people employed in film and video production (where jobs have increased by 162% over a quarter of a century).



Other traditional publishing industries, such as books and magazines, have also shed jobs, but only gradually and far less dramatically that in newspapers.



According to the bureau, another US media industry affected by the digital age is radio broadcasting, where employment has declined by a relatively modest 27% since 1990.

None of this is surprising, of course, and I would guess that the decline in UK newspaper jobs is roughly of the same order as in the US.

But newspaper romantics still denying reality, the collapse of newsprint, should note that there is no sign of a plateau. The steep decline over the 2007-09 period has abated only slightly over the six years since, and the trend remains inexorably downward.