Michael Rosenwald,

 This passage is adapted from Michael Rosenwald, “Print Is 
Dead. Long Live Print.” ©2016 by Columbia Journalism 
Review.
Two decades have passed since newspapers 
launched websites, and yet here we are. Big city 
papers have gone under, thousands of journalists 
have lost their jobs, and the idea that digital news will 
eventually become a decent business feels like a 
rumor. The reality is this: No app, no streamlined 
website, no “vertical integration,” no social network 
has come close to matching the success of print in 
revenue or readership. And the most crucial 
assumption publishers have made about readers, 
particularly millennials—that they prefer the 
immediacy of digital—now seems questionable, too.
I wish I were being hyperbolic, but Iris Chyi, a 
University of Texas associate professor and new 
media researcher, has been collecting facts to support 
these assertions. While pursuing her PhD in the late 
1990s, Chyi conducted audience research for the 
Austin American-Statesman. But looking at reader 
metrics nearly a decade later, it became clear to Chyi 
that online penetration and engagement weren’t 
growing. This got her wondering whether 
newspapers were pursuing a future that would never 
come.
Chyi began conducting surveys and collecting 
readership data, analyzing it all in academic papers 
and a recent book titled, Trial and Error: U.S. 
Newspapers’ Digital Struggles Toward Inferiority.
She has come to believe that the digital shift has been 
a disaster for media organizations, and that there is 
no evidence online news will ever be economically or 
culturally viable. “They have killed print, their core 
product, with all of their focus online,” Chyi told me 
in an interview.
In her book, Chyi writes that “the (supposedly 
dying) print edition still outperforms the (supposedly 
hopeful) digital product by almost every standard, be 
it readership, engagement, advertising revenue,” and 
especially willingness to actually pay for the product. 
In a paper published earlier this year, Chyi examined 
data collected by Scarborough, a market research 
firm, for the 51 largest US newspapers, finding that 
the print edition reaches 28 percent of circulation 
areas, while the digital version reaches just 10 percent 
Publishers argue that print readers are just getting 
older while younger readers move further away from 
even considering print, but Pew surveys and Chyi’s 
analysis of the Scarborough data show that 
considerable interest in print still persists, even 
among young readers. Pew reports that print-only is 
still the most common way of reading news, with 
more than half of readers last year opting for ink on 
their hands every day. The percentage who only read 
news via a computer? Five percent in 2014 . . . and in 
2015? Also 5 percent.
Chyi’s findings show that among 18- to
24-year-old news readers, 19.9 percent had read the 
print edition of a newspaper during the past week. 
Less than 8 percent read it digitally.
Chyi has been making this argument for several 
years, but when I spoke to her this past summer she 
told me that few people in the industry were paying 
attention, including media reporters. Now they are. 
Jack Shafer, a sharp media critic at Politico, 
highlighted her research in an October column on 
the enduring value of print, but missed the larger 
context—that her numbers don’t exist in a vacuum. 
Print is rebounding or stabilizing in other areas of 
daily life. Sales of print books have risen every year 
since 2013, while e-books have leveled off and in 
some genres declined. Yet as book publishers double 
down on print—even raising the price of e-books to 
make paper more attractive—the cost of printed 
newspapers is going up, not down. Publishers are 
watering down the lemonade and asking for more 
quarters. You don’t have to be an economist to see 
this won’t end well.

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