The decline of newspaper journalism is frequently attributed to failure to adapt, and the underlying cause was the removal of a revenue stream that had nothing to do with journalism.
The bundled product
A newspaper combined news, sport, listings, classified advertising, display advertising, puzzles and comment in one purchase.
Which meant readers who wanted only one element funded all of it.
Classified advertising in particular — jobs, property, vehicles, personal notices — generated substantial revenue and required no journalism at all.
The unbundling
Online platforms served each element separately and better.
Job listings, property listings and vehicle listings each moved to dedicated sites with search, filtering and far lower cost.
Which removed the revenue that had cross-subsidised news production, and there was no way to compete since the online version was genuinely superior.
The advertising shift
Display advertising moved to platforms offering targeting and measurement that print could not.
Which meant advertisers could reach specific audiences and verify response.
The revenue that reached publishers online was a fraction of print rates, since supply of advertising inventory became effectively unlimited.
The free news problem
Publishers made content free online during the early period, on the expectation that advertising would fund it.
Which established an expectation that proved difficult to reverse.
Paywalls were introduced subsequently with varying success, and the publications that succeeded generally had distinctive content that could not be obtained elsewhere.
What was lost
Local news specifically, which had depended most heavily on classified revenue and had the least distinctive national content.
Which produced closures and consolidation, documented extensively.
Research has associated local news decline with reduced electoral competition, lower turnout, increased government borrowing costs and reduced civic participation, attributed to reduced scrutiny.
Attempted responses
Subscription and membership models, which work for national and specialist publications and struggle for local ones.
Philanthropic funding, which has grown and covers a fraction of what was lost.
Public funding, which raises independence questions and exists in some form in several countries.
And bargaining codes requiring platforms to pay for news, introduced in several jurisdictions with contested results.
The platform relationship
Publishers became dependent on platform distribution for audience.
Which meant algorithm changes affected traffic substantially and without notice.
Several publishers restructured entirely around platform distribution and then found it withdrawn.
What survives
Publications with distinctive content commanding direct payment.
Specialist and trade publications serving audiences who need the information professionally.
And nonprofit newsrooms funded by grants and donations, which have grown substantially and cover investigative work that commercial models no longer fund.
The attention economy
Publishers competing for attention on platforms adopted the techniques that platforms reward.
Which produced headline styles optimised for clicks, aggregation of content originating elsewhere, and volume over depth.
The economics forced this — advertising revenue per view is low enough that volume is the only route to revenue under that model.
Publications that moved to subscription generally reversed it, since retaining a subscriber requires being worth paying for.
What journalism costs
Investigative work is expensive, slow and frequently produces nothing publishable.
Which means it was always cross-subsidised, and it is the first thing lost when funding contracts.
Court reporting, council reporting and routine local coverage are similarly unprofitable individually and are what scrutiny consists of.
Nonprofit models
Newsrooms funded by foundations and donations have grown substantially and produce a meaningful share of investigative output in several countries.
Which raises questions about funder influence and about sustainability beyond initial grants.
Collaborations between nonprofit and commercial newsrooms have become common, sharing costs on large investigations.
Trust
Measured trust in news has fallen in most surveyed countries over recent decades.
Which has multiple proposed causes and is consistent enough across countries to suggest structural rather than local explanations.
Wire services
Cooperative news gathering shared between publications, which allowed any paper to carry reports from everywhere.
Which reduced duplication and produced a shared factual base across otherwise different publications.
Their business model has also been disrupted, since the content they supply is now widely available directly.
Public interest journalism
Coverage of courts, councils and public bodies is expensive and generates little audience individually.
Which means it has contracted most severely, and the consequences are the ones the research documents.
Schemes funding local democracy reporters, placed in newsrooms and covering public bodies, have been established in several countries as a partial response.
What readers can do
Paying for journalism they value, since advertising will not fund it.
Which is a straightforward point that people who complain about the state of news frequently have not acted on.
Aggregation and search
Search and aggregation platforms became the route by which most readers reached news.
Which shifted the relationship from readers choosing a publication to encountering individual articles.
Brand loyalty weakened correspondingly, and publishers found readers unable to name where they had read something.
Which weakened the direct relationship that subscription models now depend on rebuilding.