Only nine newspapers have more than 100,000 subscribers in a nation of 330 million people

From The Decline and Fall of Newspapers by Charles Lipson.  For most of my adult life I have had ink in the blood, subscribing to multiple physical newspapers and many weekly or monthly magazines.  And those days are behind us for many of the reasons outlined by Lipson.  I enjoyed it at the time and miss it but that level of quality reporting is gone.  Now the quality has to be sought in special niches and the big purveyors are focused on opinions, emotions, clicks, and press release journalism. 

Lipson has some fascinating data in the midst of the elegy.

The most important point is the most obvious: The changes are huge – and irreversible. One recent study shows that in our country of 332 million people, no newspaper has a print circulation of more than 1 million. Only nine have more than 100,000 subscribers. Among the 25 largest papers, only one showed an increase in circulation, and it serves a retirement community. It’s shocking, really, that a paper with less than 50,000 subscribers is among the nation’s largest.

The decline is relentless. Print papers are losing one out of eight subscribers every year. Their daily circulation, over 63 million at its peak in the 1980s, is now about one-third that size. Over 25% of all American newspapers have died in the past 15 years.

Several "papers" have more than a million subscribers but most of those are electronic subscriptions, not physically printed papers.  

Most of the remaining “print” papers have become essentially online operations. The Washington Post, for example, has only 159,000 print subscribers but over 3 million online. 

It is a different epistemic world with pros and cons.  But it is hard to let go of the smell of ink print and the rustle of paper.