Can print newspapers be saved? The total estimated print circulation of US newspapers peaked in the early 1990s, and has been declining ever since. Circulation is now below what it was before World War II.
Many celebrate the demise of the newspaper industry, especially given that digitally-based news (including via social media) provides such a low-cost, diverse alternative to an industry whose reputation has been shattered by the almost comical narrowness of its longstanding liberal bias. Yet as much as I share that frustration with so-obviously partisan reporters claiming to be the disinterested guardians of American democracy, something integral to the health of our republic has been lost as print newspapers arriving daily on the doorstep become an endangered species. As Alexis de Tocqueville declared in Democracy in America about print media and the American people: “The newspaper brought them together, and the newspaper is still necessary to keep them united.” Without newspapers, will, as we’re warned, “democracy die in darkness”?
As a native Northern Virginian, I grew up reading the Washington Post in print—as its old (less savior-complex-sounding) slogan went: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.” My grade-school interest in the comics and sports sections—especially learning to decipher baseball box scores—in time matured into reading most of the newspaper every morning, a tradition I have maintained even while most other members of my millennial generation have dispensed with print media (and their expensive subscriptions). Though I am frustrated daily by the editorial decision-making of even the Post’s news desk, in fifteen minutes or less, I can gain a remarkably broad knowledge of the day’s international, national, and local news.
Much of the benefit is easier to perceive when compared to the digital media that has largely replaced print newspapers. In comparison to many of their digital brethren (though thankfully not this one), print stories and op-eds aren’t broken up every couple of paragraphs with distracting advertisements or eye candy. Moreover, whereas the newspaper is a single thing unto itself, one’s smartphone or laptop presents a constant, difficult-to-resist temptation towards the infinite scroll of social media or following countless Wikipedia threads or curious Google searches, which is the case even when reading excellent online long-form journalism.
Though it’s true that podcasts, social media, and Substack blogs offer a more intellectually diverse information ecosphere than the staid predictability of the Washington Post or The New York Times, research indicates that consuming information via print results in far better comprehension. And to get one’s news primarily from social media (as many Americans now do) risks becoming overly-reliant on an often simplistic, emotive, and stove-piped form of discourse that is inimical to the kind of extended, thoughtful debate required for republican government. In our increasingly anonymous and atomized world, digital partisan echo chambers reduce our exposure to people (and ideas) different from our own, even though such persons may literally live next door to us.
As Tocqueville observed, the influence of the press in early American life was immense. “It is the power which impels the circulation of political life through all the districts of that vast territory. Its eye is constantly open to detect the secret springs of political designs, and to summon the leaders of all parties to the bar of public opinion,” wrote the French aristocrat. Even when newspapers were demonstrably partisan, as they typically were until journalistic objectivity became part of the professional brand beginning in the 1890s, their role was to both inform readers and bring them into conversation with their political representatives.
Despite his disdain for American journalists who could be “crude” and “artless,” Tocqueville recognized that a vibrant, independent press served as an important “ingredient of liberty” and even sustainer of civilization, because it was not beholden to elite bases of power. “In America there is scarcely a hamlet which has not its own newspaper.” That, of course, is no longer true—the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are owned by billionaires, while the largest print dailies represent little more than the opinions of the “American aristocracy.” Over the last generation, many modestly profitable family newspapers have sold out to larger, publicly-traded corporations in the search for higher quarterly revenues, destroying many multi-generational local and municipal newspapers.
If America is to uphold a free press tradition that predates our very founding—and avoid a future world of news that is entirely screen-dependent—we have our work cut out for us.
Robert D. Putnam famously catalogued the effects of this crisis in his now classic Bowling Alone. His research found that Americans who regularly read newspapers were more knowledgeable about current events, had higher membership and participation rates in local civic associations, volunteered more frequently, had higher voter turnout rates, and trusted their neighbors more than Americans whose sole source of news was television. Since then, further research has linked the closure of newspapers to declines in civic engagement, increases in government waste, and more intense political polarization. As local news dies off, Americans pay more attention to national politics, reducing competition in local campaigns.
American journalists are well aware of (and bemoan) this frightening trend and its effect on the health of our polity. Yet attempts to restore record-low trust in the fourth estate have been risible. After the November election, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced that the paper’s opinion section would be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” as if valorizing these principles would somehow persuade millions of disenchanted Americans of the Post’s editorial integrity. Since then, though, there has been little appreciable change in how the newspaper covers the issues of the day.
That every section of the prominent American dailies features content within a scarcely-hidden liberal bias is suggestive that the ideological rot of our nation’s media industry is deep indeed, beginning with the training they receive in journalism schools. Journalists working even the domestic news or sports desks have been trained to look for stories that will further particular narratives about race, sex, gender, social class, and religion. One looks in vain, for example, for straight news stories from the Post or the Times sympathetic to religious conservatives.
Nevertheless, I know I am not the only one who yearns for a newspaper delivered daily to my driveway, one I may not always agree with, but which provides a significant chunk of information required to be an informed citizen in a free republic. The popularity of Walter Kirn’s County Highway, a 20-page broadsheet published six times per year, born during covid lockdowns and serving as a “hand-made alternative to the undifferentiated blob of electronic ‘content’ that you scroll through every morning,” suggests I am not alone. Yet as impressive as that broadsheet may be, its infrequency can only make it a competitor with magazines such as The Atlantic or Harper’s rather than a replacement for outlets that inform us daily.
Admittedly, it would require an incredible amount of creativity (and financing) to replace America’s dying print media industry, including both local media to report on the news citizens require to make informed decisions on local politics, but also ones that can appeal to a broad cross-section of our diverse nation. The Wall Street Journal is too urbane and elite to fill that role; the New York Post, despite some periodic strong reporting and opining, remains too much of a tabloid (and, like the Journal, is too focused on one part of the country).
It’s possible that those colleges and universities with a strong sense of the founding principles of our nation, such as Hillsdale College, which currently offers a minor in journalism, could offer journalism majors with the hope of restoring a profession that, since our nation’s founding, has been integral to republican self-government. It’s difficult, however, to imagine this being done at a sufficient scale to combat or replace legacy print media. Nor does it seem likely that investors could be persuaded to corral enough conservative journalistic talent to form competitors and replacements to dying papers.
Perhaps, then, what is most realistic for now is for Americans to fashion personal, bespoke means of consuming information that, as much as possible, incorporates the traditional benefits of paper-reading while resisting the worst tendencies of the digital age. One such way to do this is to subscribe to veritable print publications which, though they are not dailies (or even weeklies), still provide a means of reading long-form journalism and essays without the distractions of the Internet. Another is to be intentional about reading local online sources, whether it be the “local” section of larger papers, or the websites of those smaller local papers that remain. Setting careful guardrails around our consumption of social media, as Clement Harrold recently urged at First Things, would also be beneficial to the health of our republic.
There are even bipartisan legislative proposals to provide tax credits for those who subscribe to local news sources as a means of supporting outlets not as beholden to the partisanship of corporate legacy media. None of these, I acknowledge, is a particularly satisfactory replacement for what has been lost, given the decline and increasing irrelevance of print journalism.
For now, I remain one of an increasingly small percentage of Americans who still shell out hundreds of dollars a year for a print subscription to my hometown paper, willing to put up with its pervasive bias, in part, out of a (perhaps naive) desire of teaching my children how to read the news in print and a nostalgic pleasure in reading the comics and sports with them. The framers of our Constitution so valued the press that they included its protection in the First Amendment. If America is to uphold a tradition that predates our very founding—and avoid a future world of news that is entirely screen-dependent—we have our work cut out for us.