The impact of cyberspace on newsprint journalism is at the core of this text. After a brief history of U.S. news dailies and weeklies it turns attention to those journals’ status today. A wide range of forces that impinge on their success and failure are explored, including the decline of their relevancy for an increasing percentage of the population. Newspapers’ prospects for the future is the primary focus as papers curtail their dependency on historically physically-delivered patterns to shift to more economical and faster methods of supplying the news. Rivals for the attention of traditional readers are burgeoning. Possibilities for the outcome over the next decade are investigated. The profound effects of change on newsrooms, advertising, circulation, economics, and the place of newspapers and their communities are fully examined.

Jim Cox, a leading radio historian, is an award-winning author of numerous books on the subject. A retired college professor, he lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Jim Cox
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 232
Bibliographic Info: appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7829-3
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1649-0
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments ix

Prologue: Blazing a Paperless Trail 1

1. The Times of Our Lives 5

2. A Nation of News Readers 15

3. The Last Word 26

4. The Only Thing Constant 34

5. Supply and Demand 50

6. The Bad News Is 55

7. Out of the Hybrid an Oxymoron 63

8. You Get What You Pay For 83

9. Paywalls: Like Hitting Pay Dirt? 90

10. An Endangered Species 98

11. Cutting to the Paper Chase 107

12. Are We Missing Anything? 113

13. An Alternating Landscape 122

14. Families in Distress 127

15. Falling from Grace to Disgrace 143

16. Connecting in a Multimedia Epoch 150

17. Digital Mags: Feel the Magic? 158

18. The Future of the Form 173

Epilogue: Gimme Five 180

Appendix: Highlights of American Newspaper History 185

Chapter Notes 193

Bibliography 209

Index 215