IN A recent issue of the beloved comic book, Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, quits his job as a journalist at the Daily Planet because the paper has gutted its news coverage. Is the outlook for newspapers really so dire that even superheroes have given up on them? Ever since 2006, when The Economist asked on its cover who had “killed the newspaper”, the industry’s pains have only intensified. Advertising has plunged. Readers have kept moving online. Revenues of newspapers continued to fall, dropping to $34 billion last year in America—only about half of what they were in 2000. .../...
Many papers have been raising the price of their subscriptions and news-stand copies, which has helped to stem losses. But a more important contributor to the change of mood in newspapers is what Ken Doctor of Outsell, a consultancy, terms a “revolution in reader revenue”. “Paywalls”, methods of charging readers for online content, have become popular. The number of American newspapers with some sort of paywall has at least doubled this year. More than a quarter of newspapers now have one, and most big groups that do not have plans to charge for digital access. This is a global trend: newspapers in Brazil, Germany and elsewhere are fed up with giving away their articles for nothing on the internet. .../...
The article in The Economist is here.
