Not the end of the story?

Published April 16 2012

Newspapers. Remember them? (www.shutterstock.com)

The rather bleak future of print journalism was covered this Sunday in The Sunday Times supplement magazine. The article, “Not the End of the Story”, brought to light the perils faced by local, regional and print newspapers in both the USA and the UK.

The Bureau has taken the most hard-hitting and interesting facts and stats in the article and laid them out below.

A third of Britain’s national-newspaper buyers have disappeared in the last ten years.
Since 1985, the Guardian has lost more than half its sales. It gives away its online content and is burning £90,000 a day.
At 230,000 copies, Private Eye’s circulation remains unchanged since 1985.
By April 2043 there will be just one regular newspaper reader left in the United States, according to Philip Mereva, a US academic.
In January, the University of Southern California predicted that “most printed daily newspapers will be gone in about five years”.
The number of digital subscribers to The Times already exceeds the daily circulation of The Independent.
Nearly a quarter of Americans use mobile devices to get news.
For every $1 newspapers won from online advertising last year, they earnt $10 in print ads.
The Newspaper Society lists 1100 regional and local newspapers, down from 1167 last July.
In 2008, the internet took more money than print in classified advertising for the first time.
Since 2008, newspapers have lost more than £1 billion in classifieds, much of it from the regional press, and the analyst Claire Enders estimates that 40 per cent of the jobs in regional journalism have gone in five years.
In last summer’s riots, the Liverpool Echo’s initial online story recorded 850,000 page views. A live blog was viewed by more than 85,000 people.
The New York Times has 455,000 digital subscribers, and analysts at Barclays Capital see a potential boost in circulation revenue of $100m (£63m) over the next two years.
The Daily Mail edged past the New York Times in January to become the world’s most viewed newspaper website.
The USC predicts that at least four American newspapers with global reach will continue to publish daily – The New York Times, USA Today, The WAshington Post and The Wall Street Journal, while local weekly and bi-weeklypapers may continue in print form.At regional level, there are still nearly 500 paid-for weekly newspapers, a drop of just 1 per cent in 10 years.
Britain has 83 paid-for daily regional newspapers.
According to the Newspaper Society, local media are seen by 33m print readers a week and 42m web uses a month.
The number of British households with broadband has doubled in six years, from 34 per cent in 2005 to 68 per cent last year. Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, wants “superfast broadband”, which has speeds above 24 Mbps, to reach more than 90 per cent of the population soon.
The biggest regional newspaper group, Johnston Press, has 241 titles in the UK and the Republic of Ireland, with a combined circulation of 4.5m. Sir Ray Tindle, publisher of more than 220 local newspapers, is still expanding. Three new papers launched last year and more are planned.
In the United States, the number of daily newspapers has dropped from 1,611 in 1990 to about 1,350. In Europe, newspapers are faring better: circulations are dropping at about 4 per cent a year, half the rate of national papers in Britain.