The US newspaper industry remains mired in a slump despite gains in digital subscriptions at some of the big dailies, a study showed Thursday.
As the newspaper sector sinks, cable television news is showing strong gains, fueled by interest in the US presidential election and the new Trump administration, according to the Pew Research Center’s annual “state of the news media” report.
The total US daily newspaper circulation, including print and digital, fell eight percent in 2016 for both weekday and Sunday editions to 35 million and 38 million, respectively, the study estimates.
Although Pew said digital circulation is more difficult to gauge, it estimated trends to be fairly flat, with weekday down one percent and Sunday up one percent.
“Following last year’s presidential election, some major US newspapers reported a sharp jump in digital subscriptions, giving a boost to their overall circulation totals,” Pew researcher Michael Barthel said in a statement.
“The newspaper industry as a whole, however, faced ongoing challenges in 2016.”
The report suggests deepening woes for smaller newspapers, given that the New York Times added more than 500,000 digital subscriptions in 2016 and the Wall Street Journal gained 150,000.
Estimating circulation data has becoming more challenging since the industry stopped releasing data about print editions, and with varying standards in reporting digital readership, Pew researchers said.
Total estimated newspaper industry advertising revenue for 2016 was $18 billion, based on Pew’s analysis of financial statements for publicly traded newspaper companies. That represents a decrease of 10 percent from 2015, and is just one-third the level of 10 years ago.
Circulation revenue was estimated at $11 billion, largely unchanged from 2015.
For cable news, meanwhile, 2016 was a year of strong gains, Pew found.
Its analysis of Nielsen Media data found viewership increased for cable news channels in 2016 in prime time by 55 percent to 4.8 million viewers.
Total revenue across the three major channels — Fox, CNN and MSNBC — was projected to increase by 19 percent in 2016, to a total of nearly $5 billion, according to Pew’s analysis of SNL Kagan data.
The three channels were projected to grow their profits in 2016 a combined 29 percent.
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