The loss of journalistic swagger can be measured partly in numbers. A generation ago, the profession summoned cultural power from employing almost a half-million people in the newspaper business alone. Now, more than two-thirds of newspaper journalist jobs have vanished since 2005, and it is widely accepted that the trend will continue in the coming decades as additional newspapers and magazines falter and slip into the publications graveyard.
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In the pre-Internet, pre-cable time, journalistic outlets like Time, Newsweek, Look and the Saturday Evening Post dominated the mass media. The Washington Post spoke to everybody from the president to the post office clerk and could boast that 65 percent of metropolitan area households subscribed. Everyone listened. Now, the press’ status as a pacesetter and respected authority has evaporated, and journalists know it.
As readers look away, it’s led to the primary cause of journalism’s decline: lack of advertising. It’s a mistake to talk about the “journalism business” when the primary function of newspapers and magazines was, for so long, to convey the message of mass advertising. As advertisers learned Internet advertising was much more effective and often cheaper than print, they defected to places like Google and Facebook that didn’t need news to attract those eyes. Where advertising once accounted for 80 percent of revenue at most newspapers in their heyday, circulation revenue and ad revenue are equal across the industry. At places like the New York Times, 60-plus percent of revenue comes from readers. Declining circulation logically followed declining advertising at newspapers, with a third of all of them folding since 2005. A generation ago, healthy revenues gave publications the resources to fight legal battles. That’s less true today.
