Bad News...

Newspaper chain McClatchy filed for bankruptcy Thursday, the latest bad headline for the struggling U.S. newspaper industry. 

McClatchy owns media companies in 14 states, including the Kansas City Star, Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Sacramento Bee. 

Amid the company’s bankruptcy filing, here are some fast facts about the newspaper industry’s recent financial struggles, based on previously published Pew Research Center surveys and analyses of data from Editor and Publisher, the Alliance for Audited Media, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• U.S. newspaper circulation fell in 2018 to its lowest level since 1940, the first year with available data. Total daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) was an estimated 28.6 million for weekday and 30.8 million for Sunday in 2018. Those numbers were down 8% and 9%, respectively, from the previous year. Both figures are now below their lowest recorded levels, though weekday circulation first passed this threshold in 2013.
• Newspaper revenues declined dramatically between 2008 and 2018. Advertising revenue fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, a 62% decline.
• Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000. Newspapers drove a broader decline in overall U.S. newsroom employment during that span.
• Layoffs continue to pummel U.S. newspapers. Roughly a quarter (27%) of papers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more experienced layoffs in 2018. The layoffs came on top of the roughly one-third (31%) of papers in the same circulation range that experienced layoffs in 2017. What’s more, the number of jobs typically cut by newspapers in 2018 tended to be higher than in the year before.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports Charlie Munger, the longtime business partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway Inc, on Wednesday said daily newspapers “are all going to die,” as technological advances cause revenue to dry up.

Munger, 96, spoke at the annual meeting of Daily Journal Corp, the Los Angeles newspaper publishing company he chairs, though he is better known for his more than four decades as a Berkshire vice chairman.

Last week's meeting came two weeks after Berkshire threw in the towel on its own newspaper empire, selling 80 daily and weekly papers including its hometown Omaha World-Herald in Nebraska to Lee Enterprises Inc for $140 million.

“What’s happened is that technological change is destroying daily newspapers in America,” Munger said. “They’re all dying.”

Munger said a few newspapers, which Buffett has said include the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, will survive the shakeout.