The Courage to Compete It’s long been a tradition and badge of honor among journalists to accept their role as the targets of the slings and arrows of the public, politicians and the business community. Now, amidst the various controversies engulfing the Trump administration, journalists and the news media have had to prove their courage again by publishing and broadcasting stories that receive unprecedented and candidly phrased pushback. Newspapers should be able to compete with all other news outlets on content. It’s the distribution of the news, however, that is the weakest link in newspapers’ entire business model.

Readership Decline Accelerates According to Pew Research Center research, the decline in daily and Sunday circulation accelerated from -3.3% at the end of September 2014 to daily, -6.7%, and Sunday, -4.2%, at the end of December 2015. The dilemma is that the newspaper business is still heavily reliant on circulation of the printed edition: 78% of weekday circulation and 86% of Sunday circulation during 2015. The majority, or 51%, of newspaper readership is print exclusive and 19% is Web/mobile, mobile exclusive or Web exclusive, meaning that newspapers reached 69% of the US population during any particular month of 2016.

Digital Is Still Not the Panacea The decreases in daily and Sunday circulation of the printed editions were greater than the increases in digital circulation, or daily, 2%, and Sunday, 4%, so a digital distribution model is not yet saving newspapers. Many people may discover individual news stories in a newspaper’s digital edition during an online search, but are not necessarily a subscriber of either the newspaper’s print or digital editions. According to Nielsen research, 60% of Millennials and Gen Xers read newspapers’ digital editions while 54% of Baby Boomers and Greatest Generation members read newspapers’ print editions.

A Trickling Revenue Stream According to Pew, the ad revenues of publicly traded newspaper companies, which represent only approximately 25% of all US daily newspapers, decreased 7.8% during 2015, the largest decline since 2009. Although 25% of these total ad revenues were generated in the digital channel, non- digital revenues decreased 9.9% and digital revenues decreased 1.9% during 2014–2015. PwC forecasts that newspapers will be the only US advertising medium to register a decrease (-20.7%) in revenues from 2016 to 2020.

Fewer Digital Ad Dollars Regardless of Digital Circulation A 2002 Borrell Associates report on local media’s digital revenues found that local media companies sold 75% of all digital advertising in their markets – and most of this revenue was generated from banner ads on newspaper and TV Website. Fast-forward 15 years and it’s now only 18%, which is still $12 billion; and newspapers are doing better than other local media. National digital pureplay (Google, Facebook, etc.) has an 82% share, compared to 8% for daily newspapers, 3% for directory companies, 2% for TV and 1% for radio.

The Effect of Paying for News Of all people who pay to access news content, 54% subscribe to newspapers, compared to 38% for both newspapers’ print and digital editions and 28% for digital- only newspaper versions. Not surprisingly, 70% of older adults, or those 65+, who pay for news subscribe to a newspaper. The percentage declines as the age brackets become younger: 50–64, 52%; 35– 49, 46%; and 18–34, 46%. As has been the case for decades, the biggest benefit of being a newspaper subscriber is the coupons or discounts, which is why 46% of newspaper subscribers say they are willing to pay for news access.

Was Digital a Monumental Mistake? According to a summer 2016 scholarly paper, very few of 51 major US newspapers studied had more online readers during 2016, compared to 2007.   More telling, the research found that despite a decline in total print newspaper readership, newspaper readers didn’t replace the printed edition with the digital edition. More people are obtaining their news from the Internet, but their sources are news aggregators, such as Yahoo News, Google News and CNN.com as well as “national” online-only sources, such as BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Vox and Breitbart.

Will Young News Readers Make a Difference? According to an early-2016 Pew Research Center report, younger Americans actually prefer to read the news – and on the Internet, specifically – more than adults 65+ (who prefer to watch the news). Of course, newspapers must create content and other incentives to draw young adults from Facebook, where more than 80% obtain their news regularly and more than 50% daily. Pew found that 81% of adults 18–29 prefer to read news online, compared to just 10% for newspapers; however, 57% preferred to watch news on TV, compared to 37% watching news online.

Where Newspaper Readers View Local TV News Data from The Media Audit’s winter 2017 survey of Washington, DC revealed that WRC (NBC), WTTG (Fox) and WUSA (CBS) had essentially the same average rating for the 6–7 pm news hour among persons 18+ who read The Washington Post.   WJLA (ABC) and WETA (PBS) had more total average persons 18+ who visited The Washington Post’s Website than those who read the newspaper. Compared to Washington, DC and The Washington Post, WTOL (CBS) and WTVG (ABC) in Toledo, OH dominated among adults 18+ who watched the 6–7 pm news hour and read The Toledo Blade and visited its Website.

Weeklies Are the Winners Generally, the readership of metro weeklies skew much younger and are more ethnically diverse than the metro dailies and deliver the elusive young male audience and young adults with higher incomes and educational attainment. In Minneapolis-St. Paul, for example, 46.9% of adults 18–34 with an income of $100,000+ read the Star- Tribune, compared to 62.8% for City Pages, the market’s alternative weekly. In Denver, 42% of Hispanic Americans 18–34 with an income of $100,000+ read Westworld, compared to 18.5% for the Denver Post.

The Opportunity to Thrive with Artificial Intelligence Although many people are concerned about artificial intelligence and robotics taking their jobs, these technologies could benefit newspapers and journalists by “streamlining some of the more mundane data- driven tasks.” Publishers will be able to include more content that involves many statistics, such as sports, economics, etc., for which it would be too expensive and time- consuming for humans to process and produce. With faster processing of data, journalists could spend much more of their time finding trends and insights, which would enhance their reporting.