United States of America
Where it happened
Denver and Seattle lost dailies within eighteen days of each other in 2009. Berkeley put the first listener-funded station on air in 1949. Los Gatos posted the DVDs.
Pinned cities
- SeattleThe Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last print edition on 17 March 2009, eighteen days after the Rocky Mountain News closed, and relaunched as a web-only operation with a staff cut from 165 to 20.
- San BrunoYouTube'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.
- BerkeleyKPFA 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.
- San FranciscoClassified 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.
- Los GatosNetflix 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.
- DenverThe 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.
- AustinThe 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.
- ChicagoThe 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.
- WashingtonC-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.
- New YorkThe 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.
- BostonThe 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.