What this site covers
Culture Shop is a reference on how American media moved from print and broadcast television to the internet, told through named papers, named programmes and dated figures.
The print record runs through a short, dense stretch. The Tribune Company filed for Chapter 11 in December 2008. The Rocky Mountain News printed its final edition on 27 February 2009 after 149 years and ten months; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer stopped its presses sixteen days later. The Christian Science Monitor ended daily print in April 2009. Underneath all of it sat the classified column.
Television moved on a different clock. TiVo arrived in January 1999, YouTube in April 2005, Netflix streaming in January 2007. The Writers Guild struck from November 2007 to February 2008 over residuals for a revenue stream that barely existed. Nielsen counted pay-television households down from roughly 105 million in 2012 to below 75 million by 2020.
The independent tradition is older than either shift. KPFA went on air in Berkeley in April 1949. I. F. Stone published his Weekly from 1953 to 1971. Maximumrocknroll ran monthly from 1982 to 2019. Indymedia opened in Seattle in November 1999, ProPublica in June 2008, the Texas Tribune in November 2009, Substack in 2017.
Circulation, ratings, share and revenue figures are attributed to the body that published them — Pew Research Center, Nielsen, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics — with the year they were taken.