The Decline Of Newspapers: News and Democracy

Technology changes the world every day. Streaming services have put DVD shops out of business, and rideshare apps have rendered taxis obsolete. It is the natural evolution of industry, where technology changes our behavior as consumers. And although, many do have reservations against the pace that technology puts people out of business and breeds inequality, in general people get on board with it, because technology makes our lives easier.

However, some businesses or industries serve a noble cause by progressing our fundamental rights. In the case of News Papers that would be safeguarding the right to free speech and holding those in power accountable. The past few years have revealed that this right is increasingly under threat as the newspaper industry fights for survival. But how bad is it? Read about the arrest of Imran Khan Niazi.

Newspapers have been dying in slow motion for two decades now. In Canada, this talk has transcended the hypothetical; the government commissioned a report that speculates on what Canada’s democracy might look like in a post-newspaper world. In Britain, too, Prime Minister Theresa May has warned that the closure of newspaper after newspaper is a “danger to democracy;” Britain has nearly 200 fewer regional and local newspapers now than in 2005. The picture is similar in the U.S. A once unimaginable scenario has lately become grimly conceivable.

In the U.S., weekday print circulation has shrunk from a high of nearly 60 million in 1994 to 35 million for combined print and digital circulation today — 24 years of decline. Advertising revenue has cratered, falling from $65 billion in 2000 to less than $19 billion in 2016. Newsroom employment fell nearly 40 percent between 1994 and 2014.

The biggest hits are not to the large newspapers but to the local ones that focus on the smaller stories. New digital subscriptions at The Washington Post and The New York Times have soared since the 2016 election, but digital subscription and advertising revenue has not made up for the collapse of print advertising industry-wide. And local newspapers across the country have not been nearly as successful at the digital subscription model as the Post and the Times. Once-promising digital-first news sites such as BuzzFeed and Vice have recently missed revenue targets, and Mashable, valued in March 2016 at around $250 million, recently sold for less than $50 million.

Now that it has been adequately established that the newspaper industry is in decline, why does it matter? There will always be digital news platforms/social media and television networks to provide us with the news.

The problem is in their content. The state of accountability and awareness in a democracy depends on the quality of civic-function news: the coverage of elected officials and public institutions such as legislatures, judicial and quasi-judicial bodies, city halls, school boards and supporting public services.” There is no real money in civic responsibility.

According to the government-commissioned report published by PublicPolicy Forum called “the model of journalistic ‘boots on the ground’. “The bifurcation of [news] production and distribution, with financial returns heavily skewed to the latter. Moreover, the Internet … has quickly come to be dominated by a pair of global giants from Silicon Valley — Google and Facebook — that are not only lacking in passion for news but actively avoiding the responsibilities of a publisher.”

To encapsulate real profit has been shifted from people who produce news to people who distribute news like Facebook or other digital platforms.

The lack of money in producing news means that there is a lack of money invested in reporting and investigation. This explains the over all financial drainage in the news paper industry. But it
also highlights another phenomenon which is that news papers and news agencies no longer have exclusive ownership of their stories. Another news agency, with due credits, can have the same story circulated on its website within an hour. This essentially means that there are a lot of free riders on any one news paper’s exclusive story. And hence no one news paper would want to invest too many resources on investigative stories.

In ordinary circumstances, an industry that protects fundamental rights can rely on governmental support. However, governments in India and Pakistan have sought this opportunity to further suppress media and are using their financial constraints as a tool of subordination. News papers in Pakistan have been deprived of government advertisements and are facing a liquidity crisis because of outstanding payments. The same is the case for some news papers in Indian held Kashmir, that are seen as having a record of being critical to the Modi government.

There is a reason books can never be truly replaced by movies, that documentaries can never replace research papers and that news channels can never replace news papers. The written word is one of the purest forms of literature, where each word is deliberate and deliberated upon. There is thoroughness in the news paper that one fails to find on television. The complexity of the arguments and the readers’ ability to read at his own pace and pleasure allows the consumer of news to digest nuanced arguments. This is the reason why news papers are fundamentally tied to democracies. For an informed public that understands the intricacies of a civic system they need to be reading the news papers, because television by its very nature is more sensationalised and carries less substance.