Back sometime before the Dark Ages, when I was in journalism school, we thought of the news business and the entertainment business as separate entities—the difference between Walter Cronkite and Star Trek. Now the line between the two is increasingly blurred. So when we say “media” today, we cannot mean only the NewsBiz. Americans are influenced by the entertainment and infotainment they watch, just as they are by the “straight” news. And they watch waaaay more of the former.
Financial analysts estimate news and entertainment—collectively, the “media”—is a $3.04 trillion international enterprise. It includes news outlets, as well as digital media [television, music and radio, etc.], streaming services, and more. In many ways, the business models for news and entertainment are similar, with revenues coming from advertising, customer payments, and licensing deals. They also are subject to the same regulatory regimes: the FCC (federal communications commission) and FTC (federal trade commission).
In those days of yore, Americans got their news from a few standard outlets: local newspapers and broadcast television. Because many people in a community read the same newspapers and mostly watched one of the same television networks (originally three—NBC, CBS, and ABC), they tended to share a perspective on events, even though there were some difference among them. Local media helped establish a sense of community, a feeling that “Things may be bad, but we’re all in this together.”
In a big city with more than one daily newspaper, one might be identified as Republican and the other as Democratic. In Detroit, where I grew up, there was the Detroit News (or as my parents called it, the Nixon News) and the Detroit Free Press. The Detroit News, like many other big-city newspapers is no more; the Free Press no longer publishes daily, and there isn’t home delivery every day. If you’re out and about, you can snag one from a vendor standing in major intersections. New Jersey, the nation’s most densely populated state, has no daily newspaper in any major city, not even the state capital. For most New Jerseyans, news is online only.
More than 1,800 US cities and towns have lost their newspapers in the past 20 years (60 dailies and 1700 weeklies); 1300 of these outlets were in metropolitan areas. Over the past 15 years, total weekday newspaper circulation has declined from 122 million to 73 million. Rural areas and small towns have been hardest hit by the loss of local news, but numerous major US cities no longer have a daily newspaper. These include Pittsburgh, New Orleans, and Tampa. Most recently, the 157-year-old Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced it’s abandoning its print edition. Those newspapers still publishing are shrinking, due to a loss of revenue from advertisers and subscribers. They’ve become shadows of their former selves, “ghost newspapers.”
Today, online media are filling the gap. Online newspapers cannot provide the depth of coverage of print. Stories are shorter and may lack helpful context. Reporters are fewer and generally less experienced. In online sources, the line between news and entertainment is especially fuzzy. Digital formats had a 45% media and entertainment market share in 2024. And it’s growing, in part at the expense of traditional media.
For where this economic sector is going, look to the investment firms. The fragmented media market poses a challenge to investors, just as it challenges responsible citizenship and social cohesion.
According to Standard and Poors, advertising is healthy in digital platforms, as advertisers shift their money from legacy media to digital; linear television (which follows a schedule, as opposed to on-demand streaming) at the national level, as well as radio, are struggling for advertising dollars. Only sports programming keeps this sector afloat.
The diversity of media in this new landscape leads to further splintering. The days are over when everyone watched the same programs, listened to the same news, and gained something of a shared perception of their community, the country, its strengths and its problems. That’s not to say that the media world of the last mid-century was perfect, but the results of this splintering are all around us. And we haven’t even discussed the impact of social media yet.