The Future of Print Media

Many commentators and analysts have confidently declared that the age of the printed newspaper is over. Industry wide developments including falling advertising revenues and fragmented audiences that are increasingly shifting online are said to signal the end of the newspaper industry as we have come know it. The Capstone project seeks to establish to what extent this characterization of the newspaper industry’s decline is accurate through an in-depth literature review, a series of lectures by experts in the field, and by conducting 24 interviews with publishers and editors from six countries. The study finds that while there are clearly significant shifts taking place within the print industry, particularly around attempts to monetize online content and find alternative sources of revenue to replace falling advertising revenues from print, the decline of the industry is overstated. News organizations are going through a process of transition and adaptation. In addition, the paper shows that the narrative of newspapers being in perpetual decline is mostly Western centric, and does not take into account regional variations and the fact that in many emerging countries, print newspaper sales are robust and growing.