Thirty pieces
Everything on the site, in four sections
Nine on the print closures, eight on television, nine on the independent tradition, four on the figures.
Last Editions
- 149 Years, Ten MonthsThe Rocky Mountain News printed its final edition on 27 February 2009 after 149 years and ten months of continuous publication, closing because the E. W. Scripps Company could not find a buyer.Long piece
- Print Ends on a Tuesday in MarchThe Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition on 17 March 2009, sixteen days after the Rocky Mountain News closed, and relaunched as a web-only operation with a staff cut from 165 to 20.Standard piece
- The Smallest Type on the Page Was Paying for the RestClassified advertising generated roughly 40 percent of newspaper revenue at its peak, according to Pew Research Center figures from 2000, and Craigslist's free listings drained that line faster than any other single cause.Standard piece
- Sam Zell Bought It for a DollarThe Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and eight other papers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 8 December 2008, one year after Sam Zell's leveraged buyout closed at a nominal personal cost of one dollar.Standard piece
- Twenty Articles, Then the WallThe New York Times launched its metered paywall on 28 March 2011, allowing twenty free articles per month before requiring a digital subscription — the first attempt by a major American daily to reverse the free-access norm established in the mid-1990s.Short piece
- The Graham Family Sold on a MondayThe Washington Post Company sold the newspaper to Jeff Bezos for $250 million on 5 August 2013 — a personal purchase, not an Amazon transaction — ending eighty years of Graham family ownership.Short piece
- From the First Alt-Weekly to the Last IssueThe Village Voice, founded in Greenwich Village in 1955, ceased print publication in September 2017 and closed entirely in August 2018, sixty-three years after Dan Wolf and Ed Fancher launched it as the country's first alternative newsweekly.Long piece
- The Daily That Chose Not to Die DailyThe Christian Science Monitor announced in October 2008 that it would stop printing a daily edition in April 2009, becoming the first major American newspaper to shift entirely to web-first publication while retaining a weekly print magazine.Short piece
- What the Contract Said When the Newsroom ClosedThe Newspaper Guild — founded in 1933 and merged into the Communications Workers of America in 1997 — negotiated severance and buyout terms as dozens of papers closed or cut staff between 2008 and 2014.Standard piece
The Living Room
- The Nielsen Line That Only Goes One WayNielsen's annual Total Audience Reports show pay-television households declining from a peak of roughly 105 million in 2012 to below 75 million by 2020, a fall that proceeded at an accelerating rate once streaming bundles offered a legal alternative at lower cost.Standard piece
- The Red Envelope Was Already LosingNetflix launched its streaming service in January 2007 alongside its existing DVD-by-mail business, and by 2011 the two operations were briefly separated — the DVD side as Qwikster, a name retracted within three weeks — before streaming became the company's sole identity.Standard piece
- Eighteen Seconds at the San Diego ZooYouTube's first uploaded video — eighteen seconds of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, posted on 23 April 2005 — preceded the site's public launch by months; Google acquired it for $1.65 billion in stock in October 2006.Short piece
- The Machine That Taught Viewers to SkipTiVo launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 1999 and gave domestic viewers the first commercially accessible tool for pausing live television and skipping advertisements — a capability the broadcast networks identified immediately as a threat to the thirty-second spot.Short piece
- The Strike Was About a Number Nobody Had YetThe Writers Guild of America struck from November 2007 to February 2008 over residual payments for content delivered by internet streaming — a revenue stream that barely existed at the time the previous contract was written in 1988.Standard piece
- Premium That Came With the Cable BillHBO Go launched in 2010 as a streaming companion to an active cable subscription — not as a standalone product — and its existence illustrated the tension at the centre of the bundle: the most-wanted channels could not be unbundled without destroying the economics of the channels that subsidised them.Short piece
- Channel 10, Aurora, Illinois, 10:30 on a SaturdayPublic-access cable television — mandated by the Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984, which required cable operators to provide channels for community use — gave local residents unmediated broadcast time and became the template for Wayne's World, the Aurora, Illinois sketch that moved from public access to Saturday Night Live in 1988.Standard piece
- Gavel to Gavel, No CommentaryC-SPAN began broadcasting House of Representatives floor proceedings on 19 March 1979, funded by the cable industry as a public-affairs service operating without commercial advertising, editorial commentary or correspondent stand-ups.Short piece
Kept Going
- The Station That Started Before the Format DidKPFA in Berkeley, California, launched on 15 April 1949 as the first listener-supported radio station in the United States, founded by Lewis Hill on the premise that advertising revenue distorted broadcast content — a structural argument that predated the nonprofit media debates of the 2000s by half a century.Standard piece
- Every Weekday Since 1996Democracy Now! launched on 19 February 1996 as an election-coverage special on Pacifica Radio stations and became a daily independent news programme, expanding to television and podcast distribution while remaining funded by listeners and foundations rather than advertising.Short piece
- A Server, a Camera and the WTOThe Independent Media Center — Indymedia — launched in Seattle in November 1999 to cover the World Trade Organization ministerial conference, using open-publishing software that allowed any registered user to post text, audio or video directly to the front page without editorial gatekeeping.Standard piece
- Investigative Journalism as a Tax-Exempt ActivityProPublica launched in June 2008 funded by a $10 million annual grant from Herbert and Marion Sandler, establishing a newsroom explicitly organised around the 501(c)(3) model — investigative journalism as a charitable activity — at the moment print newsrooms were cutting investigative desks fastest.Standard piece
- The State Capital Beat Nobody Was Paying ForThe Texas Tribune launched in November 2009 as a nonprofit, nonpartisan digital newsroom covering Texas politics and policy, founded by Evan Smith, John Thornton and Ross Ramsey on the premise that state-capital journalism was the category most rapidly abandoned by shrinking commercial papers.Short piece
- The Inbox Made It Personal AgainSubstack launched in 2017 with a revenue-share model that allowed individual writers to charge subscribers directly via email newsletter, reviving a distribution format — the paid subscriber letter — that predated the commercial web; by 2021 the platform reported more than one million paid subscriptions across its top writers.Standard piece
- Downloaded Five Million Times Before the Fifth EpisodeSerial, produced by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder as a spinoff of This American Life, launched on 3 October 2014 and reached five million downloads faster than any podcast previously recorded — a milestone Apple confirmed publicly in November 2014.Standard piece
- Every Month From 1982 to 2019Maximumrocknroll published continuously from its first issue in 1982 until issue 432 in May 2019, operating as a volunteer-run, advertiser-supported print zine without a corporate owner throughout its thirty-seven-year run — one of the longest continuous publication records in the American independent press.Short piece
- Four Pages, Twice a Month, No Press Pass NeededI. F. Stone published I. F. Stone's Weekly from 1953 to 1971 as a four-page newsletter written, edited and mailed by Stone alone, relying entirely on public documents — congressional records, government reports, press releases — at a time when Washington correspondents depended on access that could be revoked.Short piece
Figures
- The Revenue Curve, Year by YearPew Research Center's State of the News Media reports document total newspaper advertising revenue falling from $48.7 billion in 2000 to $16.4 billion in 2014 in nominal terms — a 66 percent decline in fourteen years.Long piece
- Two Platforms, Half the MarketPew's 2018 State of the News Media reported that Google and Facebook together captured approximately 58 percent of digital advertising revenue in the United States, leaving the remainder divided among thousands of publishers.Standard piece
- What Nielsen Counted When the Bundle Started LosingNielsen's Total Audience Reports from 2012 through 2020 provide the most widely cited annual count of pay-television households and time-shifted versus live viewing, showing the bundle's declining share against streaming's rise.Standard piece
- What the Platform KeepsPatreon, founded in 2013, and Substack, founded in 2017, both operate on percentage-of-revenue models — Patreon at a tiered 5–12 percent of creator income, Substack at 10 percent of subscription revenue, as each platform disclosed in its own published terms.Short piece