State of American Newspapers

Report Outline
Surviving Tough Times
Strategies for Stability
Challenge of New Media
Special Focus

Surviving Tough Times

Optimism in Face of Gloomy Predictions

The Newspaper business has, for the past few years, weathered gloomy warnings from without and within about its impending death. The failures of several important metropolitan daily newspapers seemed to lend credence to the doom-sayers. Thus, the optimism that prevails among newspaper people may come as a surprise to many readers, even if it is apparently supported by statistics. Daily newspaper circulation was the highest ever last year, despite the collapse of 10 dailies and the absorption by merger of 11 others. Sunday circulation continued its steady climb. Weekly newspapers, despite a slight decline from record-high levels of the previous year, remained strong. And even industry people were surprised at the rapid acceptance of the colorful national daily USA Today, published by the Gannett Corp.

Moreover, the nascent economic recovery enabled many newspaper publishers to bring glowing first-quarter reports with them to newspaper conventions, such as the one held by the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) in New York April 25–27. The atmosphere of that meeting was considerably different from the one held two years earlier in Chicago, when broadcasting and cable television magnate Ted Turner predicted that newspapers were becoming “technologically obsolete” and would disappear within 10 years.

The events of the next year seemed to bear out Turner's forecast. For several papers, victims of the recession, changing demographics, high labor and production costs, and intensified competition, the words “Final Edition” meant not the last edition of the day, but the last edition ever. The Washington Star folded in July 1981, leaving the nation's capital temporarily with only one general-circulation daily, The Washington Post. There were more casualties in 1982. The Philadelphia Bulletin, Cleveland Press, and Buffalo Courier-Express all suspended publication; newspapers in Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., Des Moines, Oakland, Tampa and Duluth merged with other newspapers (in most cases already owned by the same company) in their cities. The New York Daily News, still the nation's largest general-interest daily despite serious circulation declines, was put on the selling block by the Tribune Co. (publishers of the Chicago Tribune) with the threat that it would be closed if not sold.