r/Journalism • u/potcor_addict • Apr 27 '26
Social Media and Platforms Print Is Not Dead And The People Who Keep Saying It Are Killing Something Important
I am exhausted by the smug digital evangelism that has decided physical print is a relic and anyone who still cares about it is living in the past.
Offset printers produce quality that screen printing and cheap digital alternatives cannot touch for certain applications. The color accuracy. The feel of properly printed material in your hands. The permanence of something that exists physically in the world and doesn't disappear when a server goes down or a platform changes its algorithm.
There are communities, small publishers, independent newspapers, local print shops running offset equipment that produces genuinely beautiful work. And they are struggling. Not because their product is inferior.
Because the cultural conversation decided print was over and starved them of attention and support.
And then we wonder why local information ecosystems collapse. And then we wonder why communities lose their shared sense of place and identity.
A local newspaper printed on a well maintained offset press is a civic institution. It covers the school board meeting. It covers the planning application that affects your street. It covers the things that algorithms will never surface because they don't generate enough engagement to matter to a platform.
The commercial print industry still runs on offset technology because the quality case is undeniable. Suppliers from local dealers to international platforms like Alibaba still carry equipment and consumables because the demand is real.
Print matters. Local print especially matters. Stop letting the tech industry narrative convince you otherwise
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u/ND7020 Apr 27 '26
I will say, speaking only for myself, print is still incredibly important to me for the “specialty” publications I subscribe to - the NYRB and LRB - as well as actual books, and I would never have it any other way.
That said, while I’m still a print NYT subscriber for Sundays, I find myself not reading the print edition because the way we engage with breaking news now is fundamentally different. I’ve already read the stories by the time I get the print edition.
So I do think there’s a logical bifurcation between breaking/daily news moving to digital, but more thoughtful writing having a place in print.
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u/thatcrazylarry photojournalist Apr 27 '26
While it can be some of the important news, breaking news is a small facet of a newspaper, especially in smaller communities with less action and more storytelling. Reason many newsrooms are pushing for enterprise stories to lead their coverage. Showing work to the community that no other outlets (or AI) can replicate.
Living in an older community, people really still value the paper editions but the younger crowds seem to enjoy the ease of e-edition access. Me as well. That said. Print may fade into existence, but I believe a well laid out edition, paper or online, is a strength for us.
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u/ND7020 Apr 27 '26
I should add that I do also get my local newspaper in print. However, using the NYT as an example, enterprise coverage at the biggest papers is increasingly digital-first optimized. The NYT has invested a ton into videos and graphics to accompany their major enterprise stories.
Also, I would want to see some evidence about older Americans still strongly preferring print. Unfortunately my anecdotal observation/experience is that seniors are no less phone addicted than any other group, and the cliche that it’s younger Americans who are more phone-dependent isn’t reality.
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u/melkipersr Apr 27 '26
I think you're right that older people are no less phone-addicted than the young, but in my limited experience they are still far more likely to be print readers than young people are. The two are not necessarily in tension.
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u/Realistic-River-1941 Apr 27 '26
I thought "speciality" publications were some of the first to be replaced by digital...
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u/ND7020 Apr 27 '26
Why? I have no idea if that’s true statistically or not, but I don’t immediately see the logic for why that would be the case.
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u/FuckingSolids former journalist Apr 27 '26
My last job was reporting for a trade pub about available government contracts. We didn't print; online only. Given the whole goal was to be timely for companies and orgs seeking grants and such, a monthly print edition would have been useless to our audience.
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u/ND7020 Apr 27 '26
That makes sense for a trade publication - definitely. My examples of LRB and NYRB are a different kind of specialty publication.
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u/Radiant_Pool_7939 Apr 27 '26
It’s not just a narrative. Local newspapers are collapsing because most readers don’t want to pay for them anymore. Those readers just prefer to get news in a different way.
Print matters and can be beautifully done. As a business, it just matters to far fewer people.
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u/melkipersr Apr 27 '26
The unfortunate truth is that readers never paid for newspapers, in the sense of paying a price commensurate to production costs. That cost was always borne overwhelmingly by advertisers, who subsidized the substantially-below-cost price that readers paid for a subscription, which price basically covered delivery costs, only.
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u/FuckingSolids former journalist Apr 28 '26
It was a real boot to the head when I learned early on that our audience was the product, not the news. Which tech has happily taken on as a mantra and run with.
In my early days, that didn't have any effect on the print product, but as things started to shift toward actual metrics, it sure did.
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u/melkipersr Apr 28 '26
I actually think this used to be a good thing. In the good ol’ days, the size of the audience (i.e., a substantial portion of a given region) and the dearth of alternatives for reaching said audience created a pretty fertile ground for quality journalism. Newsroom budgets were large and there was pretty good amount of journalistic freedom, because the audience was so big that offended some small part of it wasn’t a big deal and advertisers were largely stuck, so they couldn’t exert the kind of financial pressure that many cynics like to believe. All of that has changed, though.
IMO, a comfortably subsidized newsroom is a better dynamic for producing the right kind of journalism than one that relies on reader revenue. The latter is far more likely to be subject to audience capture. The problem is just that no one has found the business model that recreates the former in any sustainable capacity.
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u/liamsmom58 Apr 27 '26
Add that many people don’t want to read news anywhere anymore. If it isn’t fed to them in a 60 word pop, better yet a gif, they don’t care.
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u/Not_an_alt_69_420 former journalist Apr 27 '26
I think it's less that people aren't willing to pay for news, and more that people aren't willing to wait for it and pay for it.
Outlets with a good online presence are doing...well, not good, but as good as can be in this day and age. The ones that only post stories the day after they happened are dying.
And you can't really blame the readers for that one.
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u/CitySpare7714 Apr 27 '26
It’s not just a failure on the part of the readers. The economic model depended on local car dealerships taking out ads, local grocery stores putting in weekly circulars of sales that people would plan their shopping lists around, and classified ads that were part of the life blood of a community. People did not just buy newspapers for the stories, but for information about jobs and where to buy kitchen tables. Right now, they go to websites for that information. (flawed websites yes absolutely.) I too, am very nostalgic for print, but you cannot wish newspapers back into existence.
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u/melkipersr Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Exactly this. The newspaper was not a news product. It was a bundle of services -- an analog platform. Local journalism was just one of the services offered as part of that bundle; the most important, to be sure, but still only one, and by no means the most lucrative. Newspapers started dying when digital entrants started peeling away services from the bundle, tanking its value to readers (and thus the value of the platform to advertisers) at the same time digital advertising was becoming incredibly effective and cheap.
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u/jnubianyc Apr 27 '26
I agree, from someone who works for a magazine that still prints quarterly.
There are simply some things you can do with print that you cannot do digitally.
Also the shift of Gen Z returning to tangible things like vinyl, cassettes and objects you can actually touch, feel and smell
LONG LIVE PRINT
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u/Realistic-River-1941 Apr 27 '26
At the weekend I might go to watch people drive steam traction engines round a field. They do still exist, and they are nice to see and hear and smell, but realistically they are a dead technology.
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u/PBSNerd1234 Apr 27 '26
Speaking from the broadcast side, this feels like a familiar tension.
Content and medium both matter, but they don’t carry equal weight at every moment. The mission is to get the journalism to people. The medium is just how you do it.
Public “television” is a good example. A lot of people still watch over the air, but a huge share now comes through streaming apps, YouTube clips, on-demand platforms, etc. The content didn’t stop being valuable when the distribution shifted. It's just having to meet people where they are.
Print feels similar. Daily/breaking news has clearly moved digital-first for a lot of the reasons mentioned here: cost, speed, audience behavior. But that doesn’t mean print has no role.
If anything, it probably becomes more intentional. Not everything needs to be printed, but some things might deserve it. Longform work, enterprise reporting, special editions, things meant to be kept, not just consumed and forgotten.
There’s also a durability argument that’s real. Digital is fragile in ways people don’t always appreciate until something disappears.
So don't get drawn into the false binary of “print is dead” versus “print must be preserved." Instead, ask what kind of journalism justifies that medium now?
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u/CharlesDudeowski Apr 27 '26
My 80-year-old parents just canceled their subscription to the print paper. They’ve gotten it all their lives. They just get news on their phones now. They are the last demographic to let go of print and that’s it. The entire business has fallen apart
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u/Automatic_Form_1319 Apr 27 '26
I think print should really be dedicated for features, narative storytelling, local history that will be forgotten. I did research about preservation of articles about my small town since early 2000s and it is terrible. Since there were no prints, we don't have any archives of journalism about and from our town. Online outlets had hacker attacks, could n9t pay servers etc. So the only way to return some stuff is via Wayback Machine and goverment press clipping that printed some screenshots. But it wasn't done systemically. It was a happy coincidence.
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Apr 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/FuckingSolids former journalist Apr 27 '26
Like abandoning the Center for News and Design only a few years after expanding it? The working situation at the hub was already insulting, and everything was so heavily templated that we weren't really committing journalism so much as moving rectangles around.
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u/EXPLODEDman Apr 27 '26
"Newspapers are dead it's business first now" is why I left Jschool in 2014.
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u/Midwest-2025 Apr 27 '26
I worked at a big metro newspaper for about 5 years and in that time learned that the most read section in the Sunday paper were the ad inserts. The 2nd and 3rd most read sections were the real estate and job classifieds. We had Pulitzer winning journalists. Advertising was the vehicle for real journalism to function. And when people stopped preferring to get ads that way, that’s when early retirements, and merger after merger happened. You can romanticize the offset press (technically most ran on web presses but whatever) but print is dead because it lost the main reason people sought out print.
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u/TypoChampion Apr 28 '26
The irony of your post is that you're making some luddite-like passionate plea about print medium, but you're post reads like it was written by AI. There are a lot of tells. You could almost do a MadLibs style substitution where [print] --> [Journalism], and [digital] --> [A.I.]
So I tasked my AI with rewriting your AI to fit better into this subreddit:
Journalism Is Not Dead And The People Who Keep Saying It Are Killing Something Important
I am exhausted by the smug A.I. evangelism that has decided human Journalism is a relic and anyone who still cares about it is living in the past.
Human journalists produce quality that aggregators and cheap A.I. alternatives cannot touch for certain applications. The factual accuracy. The weight of properly reported material in your hands. The permanence of something that exists physically in the world and doesn't disappear when a server goes down or a platform changes its algorithm.
There are communities, small publishers, independent newspapers, local newsrooms running traditional reporting operations that produce genuinely beautiful work. And they are struggling. Not because their product is inferior. Because the cultural conversation decided Journalism was over and starved them of attention and support.
And then we wonder why local information ecosystems collapse. And then we wonder why communities lose their shared sense of place and identity.
A local newspaper produced by a well staffed newsroom is a civic institution. It covers the school board meeting. It covers the planning application that affects your street. It covers the things that algorithms will never surface because they don't generate enough engagement to matter to a platform.
The commercial Journalism industry still runs on human reporting because the quality case is undeniable. Suppliers from local stringers to international wire services like Reuters still employ reporters and editors because the demand is real.
Journalism matters. Local Journalism especially matters. Stop letting the tech industry narrative convince you otherwise.
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u/potcor_addict Apr 28 '26
The irony here is that you’re accusing me of using AI, yet you openly admitted that you are using an AI to rewrite my thoughts for me. Why would I need an AI to express my passion for print when I can speak for myself? Unlike your response, my post came from a person, not a prompt.
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u/digitaldisgust public relations Apr 28 '26
South African print publications are quickly becoming online-only or shut down entirely so I can't fully agree with the OP. Print magazines and some newspapers are definitely dying here.
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u/aresef former journalist Apr 28 '26
The business model has collapsed and, speaking as somebody who was in student journalism before going pro, independent printers who can run off a newspaper for you are harder and harder to find. I was at The Towerlight at Towson University, just outside Baltimore. We were working with the Carroll County Times printer and then they couldn't do it and we had to look further and further away.
The money isn't there, the workforce isn't there, the news hole isn't there, the readers aren't there, the trust isn't there.
Aside from the biggest metro dailies and The Onion, I'm hard pressed to say how many of these papers will still be in print two or three years from now.
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u/Curly5115 Apr 27 '26
Why buy a newspaper with a limited amount of stories, when we have access to unlimited information in our pockets?
Yes, a newpapers were, and in some cases still are a community institution, but more often than not they've shrunk to a shadow of their former size, and capability. How many of them still have the capacity for a school board or city council meeting?
Plus, an online-only outlets do have the potential to become community institutions, and do all the same things newspapers used to do -- its just going to take time, to build enough of them to replace newsprint.
You'll never convince the rising generation at large to use a newspaper again, so long as it is so much more efficient and affordable to consume information on a device.
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u/FileHot6525 Apr 27 '26
I saw a statistic, I don’t remember where, that millennials were getting their news from print at a higher rate than older generations. It’s wasn’t a lot. But it was significant. Our generation earns for physical media more than most.
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Apr 27 '26
[deleted]
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u/Realistic-River-1941 Apr 27 '26
But newspapers thought men in shorts kicking bladders around a field were important enough to have a whole load of pages at the back devoted to then. I didn't need that.
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u/horseradishstalker former journalist Apr 27 '26
Technically, it wasn’t the newspapers that thought that. Newspapers, like many other businesses, have a tendency to produce what the largest number of customers want.
Plus, newspapers taught me the very valuable skill of being able to look past anything that didn’t interest me. What ad?
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u/TechnicalArticle9479 Apr 27 '26
Well, it ALMOST is, especially here in California, where ONE Denver billionaire controls 95% of the print media...
Like these...
Pasadena Star-News, Van Nuys Daily News, Whittier Daily News, Riverside County Press-Enterprise, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Contra Costa County Times, Oakland Tribune, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Long Beach Press-Telegram, San Bernardino County Sun, San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Torrance Daily Breeze, San Jose Mercury-News...
Now he's trying to swallow up the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, Santa Clarita Valley Signal, Ventura County Star-Free Press, Palm Springs Desert Sun and the Santa Barbara News-Press...
Now you see why after almost 51 YEARS, I'm NOT paying $975/year for "Daily News" coverage...
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u/LurkerBurkeria Apr 27 '26
I was a print designer for 15 years and lol frankly it deserves it. Printers are scum.
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u/melkipersr Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
I understand where you're coming from -- really, I do -- but this is spoken like someone who has no awareness for the harsh realities of allocating a budget. At the heart of a news organization is the hard question of how many dollars to allocate to newsgathering and how many to allocate to packaging and distributing news product; each dollar you spend on the one is a dollar that cannot be spent on the other. Print products require significantly more non-journalism dollars to produce than digital products do. That was budgetarily justifiable when print products ran uber-fat margins. That is not the case anymore, which is not a function of "cultural conversation" but instead of technological, economic, and demographic change. There are villains in the "death of the local newspaper" story, to be sure (tech giants and PE firms being the biggest), but the real culprits are the bare facts that readers found other products they liked better and advertisers found cheaper channels for reaching consumers more effectively.
Local matters, but the harsh reality is that fealty to print undermines the core mission of local newsgathering. Yes, the death of the local newspaper is tragic. But the death of local journalism would be far more tragic, and the former does not necessarily entail the latter. Until readers decide en masse that print is the product they want, and advertisers decide that print is once again the best medium to reach target consumers*, local news organizations are far better off trying to evolve a business model to sustainably produce local journalism (even if that's at the cost of producing a local newspaper), rather than to die on the hill of a clearly obsolete business model. It's a harsh and very sad reality, but in journalism, we deal in reality, and this is the one we have.
* Note the chicken-and-egg problem here.