One-third of U.S. newspapers as of 2005 will be gone by 2024: Medill report

Try to control your excitement.

 

And then there’s the definition of “daily” newspaper. Pretty soon we’ll be at less than 100 in the U.S. that actually produce a print edition each day — if we’re not below that number already.

Are you required to produce an eEdition each day you don’t print to be a daily? Or is having a website that constantly regurgitates AI generated clickbait enough to still be a daily newspaper?

 

Remember when making it to a top-100 paper — for years that also meant a paper with 100k circ — was a benchmark? Maybe you'd be on a major college or pro beat? Now at almost all of those joints, it's who can we get for $11 an hour to rewrite what's trending on Twitter.

 

I will say this - the thing I miss most about the daily newspaper is the opinon page, followed closely by the funnies. The Letters to the Editor and the Editorial Cartoon were perhaps the best way to synthisize the current state of affairs locally and abroad. There were some editorial cartoons that so perfectly captured a story or situation better than an A1 article that jumped or even a mult-day series.

 

Darren Rovell (probably): “Why don’t they just start writing about all the betting lines? Newspapers need to get with the times.”

 

Not to forget, of course, the ongoing saga of the Pet of the Week. But, dammit, all the things community papers do: city councils, supervisors, school boards, community events, and, yes, Friday night football.

 

We did a "Take Your Paper on Vacation" and we got dozens of submissions every year

 

That Mallard Fillmore was a funny duck.

(He wasn't)

 

I know I’ve said this before, but I remember reading something somewhere in the late 2000s/early 2010s that the last newspaper would hit a doorstep sometime around 2030 or 2031.

That seemed a long way ahead back then. Now it’s nearly 2024 and 2030 is right around the corner. I feel old.

 

And that forecast seems about right.

 

Try to think of the last time you even saw someone reading a newspaper in a show or movie (in a non-period piece).

My young son didn't know what one was when I asked him a few weeks ago.

 

Hell, thinking back to the 1980s sitcoms, the only people reading newspapers were the older characters -- and that was a plot device to show they were older.