End of an era: why newspapers are a dying breed

By Liv Stecker


We live in a Brave New World where you can have everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, delivered right to your door. It’s counterintuitive with the rising cost of gas and postage, but for rural dwellers who face a 40+ mile drive for groceries, having them delivered for free by Amazon or some other service is nothing short of miraculous. From laundry detergent and coconut oil to light bulbs and dog food, it can all arrive on your doorstep two days later. Anything you want. Anything, that is, except a newspaper.

A letter from the Spokesman Review in December of 2017 announced to rural subscribers in Northport, Metaline Falls, Ione and other small towns on the fringe of nowhere, that the paper would discontinue delivery service as of January 1, 2018. The coverage area change was determined by subscription density in rural areas, where a newspaper carrier might have to go well off the beaten path to deliver a handful of papers. Ultimately, the manpower and cost involved for the distribution of a few lingering subscriptions just isn’t worth it.

“Some of our carriers have to travel a mile or two between delivery stops,” says an employee at the circulation office of the Spokesman Review. He adds that Kettle Falls and most of the areas outlying Colville will also be removed from circulation, although Colville will remain on the route.

While it’s true that with the advent of the digital age, many households have their news delivered via social media, online news sources and of course, television, many of the off-grid holdouts have only ever known the printed medium as a source for current events. Many rural retiree households don’t own a computer, much less an internet subscription or a smartphone with the Associated Press app installed. These are the ones who feel the pain of this cut the deepest. A newspaper delivery has been their only connection to the outside world. Debbie Becker owns the Mustang Grill in Northport, which is arguably the Breakfast Mecca of the “postage stamp” northeast in Washington state.

“This will seriously cut out the world for a lot of my customers who do not have satellite TV or internet,” Becker says. And it’s not just convenience, it’s culture and nostalgia that readers are losing as well. “I sat with my grandparents and read the newspaper. I have customers who come in just to read the paper,” she shares. Becker refuses to believe that this is the only answer.

The Mustang Grill has a small battalion of local regulars who spend their mornings over coffee and the news. Now Becker is torn with how to meet this need. Internet coverage is spotty at best in many rural places, and for her to provide wifi and/or devices for people to access the digital subscription that the Spokesman Review is offering in substitution, is a costly and cumbersome solution. And this is just one small representation of the piece of our communities that will be feeling the loss.

The Spokesman Review says that areas of North Idaho and Whitman County will also be cut from circulation. It’s a problem with no easy solution. Sporadic delivery routes are inefficient at best, and expensive for the paper at worst. Boosting subscriptions in rural areas could help, but is the era of printed material really drawing to an end or is there a new generation of real-paper readers that will emerge from the digital age?

In a 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center, two out of ten Americans said they still read a printed newspaper. Four of these same ten claim to get all of their news online, and more than half of them named television as their main source for news. This statistic becomes more dramatic when broken into age groups: while nearly half of readers over the age of 65 say they still read the paper, only 5% of news-seekers from the ages of 18-29 ever look at printed material - most of them get their news online. If only half of our retirees are reading the paper, and the numbers plummet from there, it’s hard to fault forward-thinking newspapers from adjusting their practice. Projecting forward, it’s easy to speculate that in another 20 years the art of printing will be more of a quaint throwback to nostalgia than a profitable enterprise.

The University of Missouri conducted a survey in 2013 that demonstrated the difference between newspaper readership in rural areas vs. urban ones, and four years later, it’s a safe bet that the disparity has grown even more since then. At that time, two-thirds of rural Americans still read their local paper.

While the Spokesman Review and other large papers that have historically served a large geographic area seem to be shrinking their physical circulation, local weekly papers seem to be holding their own. A study by Stanford University says this is due to a solid relationship of trust between the paper and local residents, and the attention to local detail. What most local weeklies lack, however, is the big picture news clips from across the county lines. National and global news are where rural subscribers are taking the hit, subscribers who often make up some of the most consistent voting base and seems to have swayed the historic presidential vote of 2016. If they’re not getting the news from large circulation newspapers, then where? It’s a quandary that has no universally happy answer.