Robert Kaiser, then-managing editor of the Washington Post, visited Japan for a conference in 1992. One of the presentations he heard there concerned technology and the news business. Digital communications, the speaker said, would make journalism unrecognizable. Kaiser was shocked. He spent the trip home writing a memo for Post executives on what he had learned. “None of this is science fiction,” he urged, “it’s just around the corner.”
Nothing significant came of the memo. Such was the case throughout the news industry, where editors and publishers ignored similar warnings. They were content with revenues generated by classified ads, coupon inserts, and department store notices. By the turn of the century, they had grown so complacent that when the industry began to change just as the speaker had predicted, they promptly hit a brick wall.
The total circulation of weekday newspapers in the United States was 60 million when Kaiser went to Japan. In 2017 it was an estimated 31 million. In 1992 the total advertising revenue of U.S. newspapers was $31 billion. In 2017 it was an estimated $16 billion. It’s as if Thanos from the Avengers movies had snapped his fingers and eliminated half of print journalism.
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