The Media Landscape Over the Last 50 Years

Dawn Andersen
Apr 12, 2020
8 min read

Updated: Sep 8, 2023

Photo Retrieved from: https://natoassociation.ca/the-new-face-of-journalism-in-a-digital-age/

The implicit public responsibility journalists hold has been continually glossed over—only now as their organizations threaten to disappear is there a collective understanding of what has been unmistakably lost.

Journalism is a time honored craft with a long history, journalists undertaking the task of presenting factual and beneficial news to the public. The climate of journalism and the sensibility of journalists has gone through a metamorphosis.

The 1970s

Within the last fifty years, a fairly short period of time historically speaking, journalism has seen some of its most significant changes. The habitat that once cultivated traditional media no longer exists.

Our oldest and most venerable news organizations find themselves at risk, having to grapple with digital age giants for ad revenue and readership. After fifty years of fluctuation and change in the media scape, these old giants find themselves challenged to adapt if they want to survive.

To begin, the decades leading into the mobile era are crucial in making a full analysis of the changes. In 1971, before the Supreme Court, journalists won against former President Richard Nixon and successfully exposed several Government lies and obscurations of truth.

They paved the way for the swell of the immense popularity of investigative journalism. This major victory reinvigorated the field and newsrooms were prosperous—journalists were ever eager to press on behind their typewriters in smokey offices.

Estimates taken from Pew Research gauge

nearly 63 million daily subscribers to print media during this time period.

The industry was booming and very lucrative, Pew Research showing the circulation revenue as nearly $4.95 billion or $23.7 billion in 2020 after inflation.

Meanwhile, diversification was budding in the field introducing names like Barbara Walters and Max Robinson. In addition, televisions beamed The Vietnam War directly into the living rooms of so many Americans; a great deal of them began sourcing a greater deal of their news consumption from televised broadcasts.

The 1980s

Without delay, the 1980s ensued and television broadcasting produced 60% of station profits; coinciding with blooming conglomeration and corporate pressure shift towards profit motivation.

By the same token, in 1983, Ben Bagdikian, disclosed that only 50 corporations owned 90 percent of the media. The shift began an erosion of local news coverage, as many stations turned to national reporting as a means to draw more viewership and profits.

CNN introduced the 24 hour news cycle and viewers witnessed tragedies in real-time from all over the country.

People were hooked by the instant gratification of following some new and equally breaking news story each time they turned the TV on.

Additionally, the 1987 Fairness Doctrine repeal defined the future of talk radio by removing the mandate to discuss controversial topics relevant to public interest and providing opposing viewpoints.

The 1990s

During the 1990s, investigative journalism found it’s resurgence, and tabloids began to grow in popularity.

Some of the most prolific scandals had readers holding their breath and journalists muck-raking facts.

Not to mention, reporting directly from the front lines of active conflicts was a major development. Notably, the public gained access to the internet, although it wasn’t particularly mainstream until 2000, and in 1995 Craigslist, a free classified ad website was founded.

Then, The Telecommunications Act accelerated the conglomeration of media, and with this in mind, Michael Corcran wrote in a Truthout article, “The act dramatically reduced important Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations on cross ownership, and allowed giant corporations to buy up thousands of media outlets across the country.”

The aforementioned fifty corporations were reduced to only six. Additionally, Jill Lepore wrote in a New Yorker Article “By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned.”

By examining the few decades before the mainstream of the internet, one can see the transformation that eventuated after 2000.

The 2000s

Sooner or later, almost every home in the United States had access to the Internet in the 2000s, and the news landscape began to grapple with that fact.

Website development started to emerge in news organizations allowing them to post video stories, which presented its own dilemmas.

News outlets had to decide whether to post news stories immediately to beat their competitors or wait for their aired broadcast time to preserve their viewership.

As a result, free news was available and readers became accustomed to it as a standard, and blogs opened up more ways to find opinions and lifestyle oriented news.

Craigslist expanded across the United States, diminishing classified ad revenue. Social media started to appear and gain users such as 2004’s Facebook, 2005’s Reddit, 2006’s Twitter, and most recently Instagram in 2010.

Podcasts emerge, but lack the significance to pose an ominous threat to terrestrial radio. Then, in 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, this was a watershed moment in the mobile era.

The advent of the smartphone as we know it would forever change the way we consume media.

In the wake of the ability to connect to the internet anywhere there is cellular access, came the access to a limitless pool of information with little to no barrier for entry to add into, the materialization of the citizen journalist.

The 2010s

Immediately compounding in 2010, efforts of news organizations were in full effect to acclimate to the mobile era.

Broadcasting was considered an archaic form, given that the public now had the news and internet in their pockets with free reign to instantly gratify their whims and curiosities.

To explain, Business Insider reported that, “Traditional TV viewership continues to fall among every major demographic year of year.”

Pay-walls were enacted to help gain more financial support for traditional journalism and journalistic institutions.

Alternatively, Google, Facebook, Buzzfeed, and Huffington Post became some of the largest news aggregators and in doing so invited heaps of clickbait and fake news.

Markedly, social media exploded exponentially, and organizations quickly saw the utility in using them and other aggregates to boost viewer and readership in a more intimate way.

Simultaneously, this transformed traditional media from a one way communication into a two way conversation.

At the present time, media environments no longer cultivate new traditional outlets, and those still enduring are facing grim challenges.

A graph from Pew Research shows print media has declined to 31 million daily subscribers, and since 2000 Media outlets have lost 80% of their income.

Organizations are shrinking and consolidating to combat the financial losses, no longer able to sustain the large and talented teams that had upheld them at their peaks. Greg Sterling posited in a Marketing Land article.

Only “...three corporations Facebook, Amazon, and Google hold 70% of all ad sales,”

Coupled with the fact that, journalists are being laid-off, paid minimal salaries, and are trying to unionize in an effort to provide some security in the ever more turbulent waters of their job market.

Graphs from Pew Research show that since 2008, newspapers employed 62% of employees and that has since decreased by half, and newsroom employees have dropped 47%.

Also, Social media once utilized as an aggregate has become a competitor, and Pew Research shows that 68% of adults get news from these sites.

Facebook and other social media sites frequently change their algorithms, and one such change was the downgrading the importance of news posts further obscuring them in the news feed.

Facebook and Google have also become a competitor for news audiences, and news organizations have enacted paywall models in hopes of keeping themselves afloat but paradoxically turning even more away to these free and easily accessible alternatives.

Under those circumstances, traditional media seems to be on the verge of death and for a multitude of reasons.

The medium is faced with an alternative so multifaceted and with such adaptable utility that it’s impossible to do anything but integrate with it, that being free online media.

One may ask, ‘What did they do wrong?’ Consequently, in the infancy of their digital presence, news organizations were allowing news to be read online for free.

Now, by enacting paywalls, outlets oppose the new accustomed ways but have embittered readers and deterred others.

The competition has only grown more imminent with the instantaneousness of the internet. Then, the heightened rush to publish left room for error in fact checking and has eroded reader confidence.

Lastly, in an effort to chase profitability, many news organizations have vastly reduced the amount of local news they feature.

This change leaves many voices unheard, disconnecting people from their own communities and the issues that will affect them closest to home. In these ways their past decisions hurt their future efforts

As a result, news organizations are constantly piling themselves into one shared mass grave, and it doesn’t seem to have an end in sight. The inevitable mass conglomeration of news outlets beginning in the 1980s put the company's profits at the forefront of concern, instead of the company mission.

They have successfully reduced competition between news organizations to near non existence, stagnating them economically. Similarly, Jill Lepore wrote,

“Then came the fall, when papers all over the country, shackled to mammoth corporations and a lumbering, century-old business model, found themselves unable to compete with the upstarts—online news aggregators like the Huffington Post (est. 2005) and Breitbart News (est. 2007), which were, to readers, free.”

Another nail in the metaphorical coffin began with craigslist choking off classifieds but ended with digital age giants sucking up the entire ad market.

Traditional news was powerless against digital ads, able to be plastered on every webpage and designed in ways irreplaceable in any other medium. Facebook, Google, and Amazon can provide deep dives into demographics and performance as they have a monolithic amount of user metadata.

News organizations simply can’t compete with this media oligopoly.

Although it may be true, that circumstances of the current climate are grim the hope for journalism is not completely lost. Jill Lepore wrote “Aside from the thing about ads, it sounds a lot like a magazine, when magazines came in the mail.”

Donation-funded news organizations and nonprofit news organizations don’t run ads. This model could sustain local reporting, investigative journalism, and more time permitting journalistic endeavors.

However, it doesn’t seem viable for national news already deeply wounded into places like social media and Google, due to the unlikelihood of a mass switch.

Alternatively, the revival of the federal communications commission and imposing taxes on media giants would generate funds and stabilize companies which could work on a national scale.

However, it would be pertinent that news organizations would be protected under stringent laws. This also poses an external issue of the federal government and how long the bill would take to form and pass, and the critical nature of news organization problems would be reliant on the actions of legislation, which is held to no time urgency.

If this were to be a viable option action and organizing would have to be taken presently. To emphasize, the data shows a negative landslide is happening in all aspects and only steepening as time goes on.

Notably, a third option is modeled after the Wikipedia business model. It functions like a community with it’s users able to edit the stories, and accepts donations to raise money to continue to operate. It supports a communal atmosphere and reduces biases in articles.

But it’s important to realize, with this model it saves companies not journalists. Ultimately, the real answer lies within these and all of the proposed business models.

Present

Presently, most media is reliant on advertising, so if the business models were diversified and adapted to co-exist it may result in a less concentrated dependence on ad revenue and stimulate independence in the media landscape.

All things considered, the media landscape has gone through massive changes. Through the peaks of traditional media prosperity and digital age laying those institutions low, a life cycle seemingly continues.

In the past, news organizations blindly made errors based on their best judgement that compounded as time passed on. The results are issues with layoffs, paywalls, readership, and profitability.

Some have even disappeared into being history or worse cannibalized by conglomerates, unable to compete with media giants like Facebook and Google alone.

A medium based on language and the communication of information cannot go obsolete, and hope still lives on in those who care.

Working to preserve as much traditional media as possible, the changes in journalism in the past fifty years and the ones coming in the next may not be completely gratifying.

On the positive side, it is by the effort of these struggles that the form will live on into better times, with better solutions.

So long as there are those still true to the original tenets of the medium, incensed to maintain integrity and journalistic merit.

Ultimately, there will come a day where traditional journalism and media are not backed into a corner but instead located once more towards the heart of culture.

References

Bagdikian, Ben. The Media Monopoly. Beacon Pr, 1997. Business Insider Intelligence. "Traditional TV's Demographic Woes Get Worse." Business Insider, Insider, 4 Jan. 2017, www.businessinsider.com/ traditional-tvs-demographic-woes-get-worse-2017-1. Accessed 23 Feb. 2020. Corcoran, Michael. "Democracy in Peril: Twenty Years of Media Consolidation under the Telecommunications Act." Truthout, 11 Feb. 2016, truthout.org/ articles/ democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunicatio ns-act/. Accessed 20 Feb. 2020. JBV Staff. "The News Industry & How It Has Changed." JBV Business Valuation, jenningsvaluation.com/2018/01/10/the-news-industry-how-it-has-changed/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2020. Lepore, Jill. "Does Journalism Have a Future?" The New Yorker, Conde Nast, 21 Jan. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/ does-journalism-have-a-future. Accessed 24 Feb. 2020. PBS Independent Lens Staff. "Who Owns the Media?" PBS Thirteen, edited by Deborah Nelson, Independent Television Service, www.pbs.org/independentlens/ democracyondeadline/mediaownership.html. Accessed 23 Feb. 2020. Peterson, Taylor. "IAB: U.S. Digital Ad Revenues Top $100 Billion for First Time, Reaching $107.5 Billion in 2018." Marketing Land, Third Door Media, 7 May 2019, marketingland.com/ almost-70-of-digital-ad-spending-going-to-google-facebook-amazon-says-analyst-fir m-262565. Accessed 22 Feb. 2020. Pew Researchers. "Newspaper Fact Sheet." Pew Research Center, edited by Bruce Drake, 9 July 2019, www.journalism.org/fact-sheet/newspapers/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2020.

The implicit public responsibility journalists hold has been continually glossed over—only now as their organizations threaten to disappear is there a collective understanding of what has been unmistakably lost.

Journalism is a time honored craft with a long history, journalists undertaking the task of presenting factual and beneficial news to the public. The climate of journalism and the sensibility of journalists has gone through a metamorphosis.

The 1970s

Within the last fifty years, a fairly short period of time historically speaking, journalism has seen some of its most significant changes. The habitat that once cultivated traditional media no longer exists.

Our oldest and most venerable news organizations find themselves at risk, having to grapple with digital age giants for ad revenue and readership. After fifty years of fluctuation and change in the media scape, these old giants find themselves challenged to adapt if they want to survive.

To begin, the decades leading into the mobile era are crucial in making a full analysis of the changes. In 1971, before the Supreme Court, journalists won against former President Richard Nixon and successfully exposed several Government lies and obscurations of truth.

They paved the way for the swell of the immense popularity of investigative journalism. This major victory reinvigorated the field and newsrooms were prosperous—journalists were ever eager to press on behind their typewriters in smokey offices.

Estimates taken from Pew Research gauge

The industry was booming and very lucrative, Pew Research showing the circulation revenue as nearly $4.95 billion or $23.7 billion in 2020 after inflation.

The 1980s

Without delay, the 1980s ensued and television broadcasting produced 60% of station profits; coinciding with blooming conglomeration and corporate pressure shift towards profit motivation.

By the same token, in 1983, Ben Bagdikian, disclosed that only 50 corporations owned 90 percent of the media. The shift began an erosion of local news coverage, as many stations turned to national reporting as a means to draw more viewership and profits.

CNN introduced the 24 hour news cycle and viewers witnessed tragedies in real-time from all over the country.

Additionally, the 1987 Fairness Doctrine repeal defined the future of talk radio by removing the mandate to discuss controversial topics relevant to public interest and providing opposing viewpoints.

The 1990s

During the 1990s, investigative journalism found it’s resurgence, and tabloids began to grow in popularity.

Some of the most prolific scandals had readers holding their breath and journalists muck-raking facts.

Not to mention, reporting directly from the front lines of active conflicts was a major development. Notably, the public gained access to the internet, although it wasn’t particularly mainstream until 2000, and in 1995 Craigslist, a free classified ad website was founded.

The aforementioned fifty corporations were reduced to only six. Additionally, Jill Lepore wrote in a New Yorker Article “By 2000, only three hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred daily newspapers left in the United States were independently owned.”

By examining the few decades before the mainstream of the internet, one can see the transformation that eventuated after 2000.

The 2000s

Sooner or later, almost every home in the United States had access to the Internet in the 2000s, and the news landscape began to grapple with that fact.

Website development started to emerge in news organizations allowing them to post video stories, which presented its own dilemmas.

News outlets had to decide whether to post news stories immediately to beat their competitors or wait for their aired broadcast time to preserve their viewership.

As a result, free news was available and readers became accustomed to it as a standard, and blogs opened up more ways to find opinions and lifestyle oriented news.

Craigslist expanded across the United States, diminishing classified ad revenue. Social media started to appear and gain users such as 2004’s Facebook, 2005’s Reddit, 2006’s Twitter, and most recently Instagram in 2010.

Podcasts emerge, but lack the significance to pose an ominous threat to terrestrial radio. Then, in 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, this was a watershed moment in the mobile era.

In the wake of the ability to connect to the internet anywhere there is cellular access, came the access to a limitless pool of information with little to no barrier for entry to add into, the materialization of the citizen journalist.

The 2010s

Broadcasting was considered an archaic form, given that the public now had the news and internet in their pockets with free reign to instantly gratify their whims and curiosities.

To explain, Business Insider reported that, “Traditional TV viewership continues to fall among every major demographic year of year.”

Pay-walls were enacted to help gain more financial support for traditional journalism and journalistic institutions.

Alternatively, Google, Facebook, Buzzfeed, and Huffington Post became some of the largest news aggregators and in doing so invited heaps of clickbait and fake news.

Markedly, social media exploded exponentially, and organizations quickly saw the utility in using them and other aggregates to boost viewer and readership in a more intimate way.

At the present time, media environments no longer cultivate new traditional outlets, and those still enduring are facing grim challenges.

A graph from Pew Research shows print media has declined to 31 million daily subscribers, and since 2000 Media outlets have lost 80% of their income.

Organizations are shrinking and consolidating to combat the financial losses, no longer able to sustain the large and talented teams that had upheld them at their peaks. Greg Sterling posited in a Marketing Land article.

Coupled with the fact that, journalists are being laid-off, paid minimal salaries, and are trying to unionize in an effort to provide some security in the ever more turbulent waters of their job market.

Graphs from Pew Research show that since 2008, newspapers employed 62% of employees and that has since decreased by half, and newsroom employees have dropped 47%.

Also, Social media once utilized as an aggregate has become a competitor, and Pew Research shows that 68% of adults get news from these sites.

Facebook and other social media sites frequently change their algorithms, and one such change was the downgrading the importance of news posts further obscuring them in the news feed.

Facebook and Google have also become a competitor for news audiences, and news organizations have enacted paywall models in hopes of keeping themselves afloat but paradoxically turning even more away to these free and easily accessible alternatives.

The medium is faced with an alternative so multifaceted and with such adaptable utility that it’s impossible to do anything but integrate with it, that being free online media.

One may ask, ‘What did they do wrong?’ Consequently, in the infancy of their digital presence, news organizations were allowing news to be read online for free.

Now, by enacting paywalls, outlets oppose the new accustomed ways but have embittered readers and deterred others.

The competition has only grown more imminent with the instantaneousness of the internet. Then, the heightened rush to publish left room for error in fact checking and has eroded reader confidence.

Lastly, in an effort to chase profitability, many news organizations have vastly reduced the amount of local news they feature.

This change leaves many voices unheard, disconnecting people from their own communities and the issues that will affect them closest to home. In these ways their past decisions hurt their future efforts

They have successfully reduced competition between news organizations to near non existence, stagnating them economically. Similarly, Jill Lepore wrote,

Another nail in the metaphorical coffin began with craigslist choking off classifieds but ended with digital age giants sucking up the entire ad market.

Traditional news was powerless against digital ads, able to be plastered on every webpage and designed in ways irreplaceable in any other medium. Facebook, Google, and Amazon can provide deep dives into demographics and performance as they have a monolithic amount of user metadata.

Although it may be true, that circumstances of the current climate are grim the hope for journalism is not completely lost. Jill Lepore wrote “Aside from the thing about ads, it sounds a lot like a magazine, when magazines came in the mail.”

Donation-funded news organizations and nonprofit news organizations don’t run ads. This model could sustain local reporting, investigative journalism, and more time permitting journalistic endeavors.

However, it doesn’t seem viable for national news already deeply wounded into places like social media and Google, due to the unlikelihood of a mass switch.

Alternatively, the revival of the federal communications commission and imposing taxes on media giants would generate funds and stabilize companies which could work on a national scale.

If this were to be a viable option action and organizing would have to be taken presently. To emphasize, the data shows a negative landslide is happening in all aspects and only steepening as time goes on.

Notably, a third option is modeled after the Wikipedia business model. It functions like a community with it’s users able to edit the stories, and accepts donations to raise money to continue to operate. It supports a communal atmosphere and reduces biases in articles.

But it’s important to realize, with this model it saves companies not journalists. Ultimately, the real answer lies within these and all of the proposed business models.

Present

Presently, most media is reliant on advertising, so if the business models were diversified and adapted to co-exist it may result in a less concentrated dependence on ad revenue and stimulate independence in the media landscape.

All things considered, the media landscape has gone through massive changes. Through the peaks of traditional media prosperity and digital age laying those institutions low, a life cycle seemingly continues.

In the past, news organizations blindly made errors based on their best judgement that compounded as time passed on. The results are issues with layoffs, paywalls, readership, and profitability.

Some have even disappeared into being history or worse cannibalized by conglomerates, unable to compete with media giants like Facebook and Google alone.

Working to preserve as much traditional media as possible, the changes in journalism in the past fifty years and the ones coming in the next may not be completely gratifying.

On the positive side, it is by the effort of these struggles that the form will live on into better times, with better solutions.

So long as there are those still true to the original tenets of the medium, incensed to maintain integrity and journalistic merit.

Ultimately, there will come a day where traditional journalism and media are not backed into a corner but instead located once more towards the heart of culture.

References

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