When newspapers die
Newspapers are in decline due to economic and technological factors, but their lifespan is ultimately determined by demographics
Hundreds of thousands of today’s students have never even touched a newspaper. Read more in Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
Ernest Hemingway once said that any story is a tragedy—you just need to tell it honestly until the very end.
The last newspaper generation consists of people born in the early 1980s. Until their coming of age in the 1990s—when the internet entered their homes—they saw their parents reading and subscribing to newspapers and magazines. Members of this and earlier generations are digital migrants, having shifted their news and entertainment consumption to the internet. But they at least had not only the sensory, but also the economic experience of interacting with the press. They possess some consumer skills as readers and remember the myth of the newspaper’s significance.
For those born in the 1990s and socialized in the 2000s, videogames, PCs, laptops, smartphones, and all sorts of gadgets were already everywhere. These kids—the millennials—were the first digital generation, the digital natives. They might have had a sensory experience of interacting with paper, but statistically speaking, they don’t know how to buy a newspaper at a newsstand or how to subscribe to it.
Moreover, they have no need to purchase papers or magazines. In their rare encounters with the press, it is most likely given to them for free. Digital natives see newspapers either as artifacts of the past or as promotional channels. They lack both the economic and social experience of interacting with newspapers as a commodity or as an agenda-setting institution. The worst part is that this same attitude is extrapolated to journalism as a whole.
The next digital generation, Generation Z, hasn’t even had a sensory experience with the press. Hundreds of thousands of today’s students have never even touched a newspaper.
The digital natives (who have no newspaper experience) will displace the digital migrants (who have some newspaper experience) from the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and households by the mid-2030s. At that point, no one will know how to consume newspapers. Newspapers are in decline due to economic and technological factors, but their lifespan is ultimately determined by demographics. They will continue to exist as an industrial product only until the mid-2030s, at the latest. After that, newspapers will become historical artifacts, sometimes items of vintage consumption or antiquarian interest, and sometimes art forms—just as McLuhan predicted would be the fate of some media after they cease performing their original function and become obsolescent.
It will take time for the industry to go through economic shrinkage, but the process is already well underway. The press industry will collapse sometime between now and the mid-2030s.
So, the inevitable death of newspapers is not in question. It is a historical fact that simply needs time to run its course. The only question is how to calculate the remaining time.
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The death of newspapers will happen instantly and simultaneously across different countries, with little to no variation related to local specificities—despite the fact that some countries have shown positive trends in the press only recently. For example, in the early 2010s, the press fared comparatively well—even slightly increased its circulation—in China, India, and some other countries, but this was due to ongoing urbanization in those regions.
Historically, the proliferation of the press lasted almost four centuries, beginning with the first German newspapers in the 1600s. Since the emergence of newspapers was linked to the liberation of national bourgeoisies—from local princes or colonial powers—print media appeared in different countries at different times.
However, each subsequent technological wave of mass media expanded across the planet with increasing speed. While radio and television spread over decades, the internet extended its reach worldwide in just 20 years. Social media captured the world almost instantly; for them, the key areas of proliferation were demographic rather than geographical.
In other words, social media equalized the pace of media development across the globe. As a result, the factors driving the decline of newspapers emerged everywhere at once.
The most important of these factors were:
1) The media lost its monopoly over agenda setting, as the internet offered an alternative, crowdsourced mode of agenda setting;
2) Audiences and advertisers migrated to better platforms that provided more efficient advertising; and
3) Competition for time spent with media has become extremely intense—new and emerging digital media are much more effective at capturing users’ attention, leaving newspapers, and old media in general, with an ever-shrinking share of our daily media diet.
Read more in Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
See other books by Andrey Mir:
The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025) The first tweetise in history: the book is entirely written in tweets.
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
I’d argue that the news media in general is in decline because journalism produces content that does not interest enough people to sustain its audience. The internet has produced content that people want more, and the monopoly newspapers had over the classified market has migrated to cars.com, apartments.com, Zillow, Indeed, etc. Now that the journalism must carry its own weight (relative to providing value to the audience), we see that the news was not even the product readers were buying. They were buying classifieds and comics.