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more startling examples appeared in a 2004 Pew Research Center survey that revealed that only 42 percent of all Americans said they had read a print-only newspaper the previous day—down from 58 percent only a decade earlier (and 81 percent in 1964). This same poll revealed that only 23 percent of Americans under the age of thirty said they had read the newspaper the day before. Moreover, only 60 percent of Americans said they had watched TV news the previous day, down 12 percent in just ten years.8
In late 2008 through 2009 the situation worsened, particularly for the printed press and thousands of its employees. Newspapers like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Arizona Republic, and the Toledo Blade were among newspapers across the country whose management encouraged some newsroom employees to accept early retirement buyouts, while laying off others. Within weeks of each other, the Christian Science Monitor announced its plan to abandon a daily print edition, the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press both decided to scale back home delivery to three days a week, the Chicago Tribune filed for a Chapter 11 restructuring bankruptcy, and the Newark Star-Ledger barely avoided folding. Two-newspaper cities like Denver, Seattle, and Tucson now became just one-paper towns.
Much of today’s scholarship explains this public abandonment of traditional newspaper outlets by critiquing the dysfunctional journalism business ownership model in the United States or pointing to the rise of digital media options. Although these perspectives are important, they tend to cast either factor as uniquely crucial to grappling with traditional journalism’s problems with relevancy. However, neither approach alone is satisfying when it comes to addressing the growing insignificance of today’s journalism.
Indeed, neither approach is distinctively informative at this point in examining the diminution of the newsroom. For example, arguments that focus on the problems of the press’ economic model have long been prevalent. The National Education Association observed in 1938: