The Death of Newspapers Has NOT Been Greatly Exaggerated! : Robert W. Bly

Yesterday, when I went to CVS to pick up a prescription, I also added the newspaper to my purchase.

Karin, the cashier, seemed momentarily dumbfounded, and then said to me, “I have been working at this CVS for 3 years—and you are the first customer ever, in all that time, to buy the paper from me.”

She was serious. In an attempt to explain my old-school consumer habit of reading the newspaper, I told her, “I’m 67 years old.”

“That makes more sense,” she replied. “My dad is the only person I know who still reads a newspaper, and he is almost 70.”

I have mixed feelings about this whole incident, but the overriding emotion it triggers in me is sadness.

After all, I love reading the newspaper. And I have written dozens of articles published in newspapers ranging from the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle to the Baltimore City Paper.

When I was a young boy growing up in the 60s, my father – and just about every other adult we knew – bought and read the daily newspaper–one could not have imaged doing otherwise.

(In popular culture at that time, the world’s greatest hero, Superman, was a newspaper reporter for the Daily Planet.)

But today, newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur and the dodo bird.

In 1950, total daily circulation of all newspapers in the U.S. was 53.4 million copies—and the average daily newspaper cost just a nickel.

Today, in 2024, the total daily circulation of U.S. newspapers has dropped to 20.9 million copies—a 60% decline in circulation.

And just last week, I paid $5 for a copy of the Sunday NY Times. That’s 100 times the nickel cost of a weekday paper in the 1950s.

When young people of my acquaintance learn that I still read and love newspapers, many are quick to abuse me of the habit, by emphatically informing me “Nobody reads the newspaper anymore!”

To which I reply: If no one reads newspapers anymore, then why are they still making them?

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Robert W. Bly is a freelance copywriter and marketing consultant with 3 decades of experience in business-to-business, high-tech, and direct marketing. He is the first AXIOMS EXPERT at Kallisti Publishing Inc.

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