A New York Times piece in February 2008 laid out the state of the newspaper business — layoffs, buyouts, falling revenues — and was widely discussed online. Dan Kennedy’s response, quoted here, put it in proportion: the news business had been through several paradigm shifts since taking a form recognisable from the 1830s.
The argument made here was that the diagnosis was wrong, not the numbers. The problem was not change, and not only that newspapers are conservative institutions that resist it. It was that newspapers had enjoyed artificially high margins for decades, resting on an anomaly of time and space: a paper held a geographical monopoly on supplying news to a community, and defined both where the news came from — your town — and when it arrived, in the morning. Radio, television and then the internet dismantled that monopoly, and the margins went with it.
The same New York Times piece supplied the point that made the case: newspaper profits were still high. Gannett’s newspaper division had returned a 21 per cent margin the previous year, a figure other industries would celebrate. The conclusion was that owners should accept the cash cow was on its last legs and learn to live with more modest returns — which is a different proposition from the end of journalism.