How the Subscriptions Era Came Too Late to Save the World

If it had come 10 years earlier, the world would be entirely different

Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash

It’s odd that people today will pay to subscribe to almost anything, when just a few years ago nobody would pay to subscribe to a newspaper.

Most of you reading this have never subscribed to a print newspaper, but in the past nearly everyone did. I grew up without a lot of money, but I remember that when I was a child living in a trailer, the paperboy (it was always a boy) would come by once a week and collect some coins from my mom to pay for our daily newspaper. He would tear a tiny yellow postage-stamp-size chit out of his book to give to her as a receipt.

And then, once digital news came around, nobody wanted to pay anymore and the world fell apart.

You think I’m exaggerating

I am not. I draw a straight line from the death of newspapers to the election of Donald Trump, and if you don’t think he’s a disaster, you’re reading the wrong writer, buddy.

Let me explain how it used to work. I have a journalism degree and worked in newspapers for 30 years, dating back to the days when most people subscribed to a newspaper, until I was laid off from my job as editor of my local daily in 2015.

Newspapers made money from classified ads, display ads and from subscriptions. With this money, they paid a staff to cover the news and present it in a reasonably unbiased manner.

The city reporter attended the city council meeting and let you know where your property taxes went. The sports staff covered the game when your kid made a winning touchdown. If your church had a fish fry, you only had to ask and a clerk would type in the information and run a notice about it for free.

You got some regional, national and international news, too, probably from money your paper paid to The Associated Press.

If you wanted to hire someone to work for you, or you needed to sell your old car, you took out a classified ad. These ads were pretty profitable for newspapers, and everyone who was looking to find a job or apartment would pick up a paper and peruse the classifieds.

Thanks a lot, Craig

First, newspapers lost classified ads to Craigslist. I just looked up some information about founder Craig Newmark, now a billionaire, and I’m steaming mad. He thinks he is “giving back,” but he actually pounded the first nail in democracy’s coffin.

Did old Craig use any of his money to cover local news? No. Did he take pictures of your local festival? Nope. Did he interview candidates for your city council before local elections? He did not.

Nor did Craig provide access to Dear Abby or comics or anything else. He just kept the money for himself while harming society. So suddenly, newspapers across the country took a big hit and had less money for news coverage.

But we soldiered on. We still had display advertising and subscriptions.

And then digital advertising came along

If you had a sporting goods store and wanted to advertise a sale on tents, it seemed dumb to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a newspaper or magazine ad that would be seen by thousands of people who had never gone camping in their life. Instead, you could spend much less on a targeted ad that would be served only to people of a certain income living in a certain area who had already expressed an interest in camping.

I can’t really blame any business owner who decided this was a better deal.

But ask yourself whether Mark Zuckerberg ever paid a reporter to cover the death of a high school kid who died in a car accident or a big fire that burned down a local landmark or the opening of a new wing your local hospital built. Do you need me to point out that he did not?

You say newspapers sell digital ads too? Yes, they do, at least the ones that still exist do. That’s irrelevant. Clicks don’t support newsrooms — not remotely.

Sure, you can post something on Facebook about your school’s chili supper if you wanted, for free. But nobody will see it unless you pay Zuck some bucks to boost your ad.

Nonprofits didn’t have to pay to have this sort of thing printed in the local paper. We newspaper people considered this an important service to our communities.

Big Tech? Not so much.

You get the idea. Once, the revenue newspapers made via subscriptions and advertising helped pay for a lot of news and community-building. Now, all that money just flows into the pockets of billionaires.

Most likely, nobody is covering your local news at all anymore.

I worried myself sick about the death of newspapers

About 25 years ago, you could see they had a terminal illness. The business model was collapsing because as we moved news onto the internet, we still had all the expenses of paying a staff to collect and present the news, but we gave our product away online for free.

Every print journalist I know was tearing their hair out about this, and complaining that we should charge for online subscriptions, but most publishers refused to do so.

I have always thought it was odd that a bunch of impoverished reporters and editors could see that paying to produce a product and then giving it away for free was not exactly sustainable, but a bunch of rich publishers kept assuring us it would work out fine.

It did not work out fine

Of all the journalists I’ve known since my college days until now, only a very small number are still employed in newspapers. The rest have either retired, died or are doing something else now.

Who cares if some people had to change careers, right? Happens all the time. I’m not asking you to cry that I lost my newspaper career. I’m asking you to note that the disaster affected all of society.

There’s almost no local news in most communities. If you live in a news desert, and you probably do, God knows what your city council is up to. Is your school board still functioning, or has a special interest group like Moms for Liberty (Moms for Fascism would be more accurate) taken it over? Who knows?

Instead of newspapers that have to stay fairly middle-of-the-road, people consume news that is slanted to suit their specific tastes. If you are far-right, you have lots of free propaganda to choose from. If you are a lefty, you have fewer free news choices aimed at pleasing you, but there are some out there. Anyway, the far-right succeeded beyond their wildest dreams at convincing you that everything the so-called mainstream media published was just a bunch of lies. Once people accepted that, it was all over.

You and I both know — I am assuming if you’ve gotten this far without clicking away, you’re nodding along with me — that most Trump supporters have not heard or do not believe he was fairly convicted of 34 felonies or found liable for rape in a court of law or … why should I even bother to list the litany of terrible things he’s done? You either already know and are frustrated beyond belief or you refuse to believe it.

What I’m saying is, if everyone 10 years ago had decided to buy a subscription to their local newspaper, most of those papers would still be around and still providing local news and commentary and still providing a pretty balanced source of news because you just can’t get away with much bias if you’re trying to sell your newspaper to everyone in town of every political persuasion.

But people absolutely howled at the concept of paying an online subscription. It was more or less a crime against nature. I took so many phone calls from screaming people when a (very porous) paywall first went up.

Which is odd, because now people have rolled over and agreed to subscribe to Netflix and Prime and Pandora and Spotify and Substack newsletters and Medium and many other platforms.

They pay for subscriptions that didn’t even exist a few years ago. They pay to get shipments of ready-to-cook foods from online meal subscription services. They subscribe to Microsoft Office and games and all-you-can read ebook platforms and self-improvement courses. You can subscribe to get razors, for God’s sake! Americans spend an average of $219 per month on subscriptions now.

Imagine. If people had been willing to pay around $5 per month even 10 years ago, newspapers would have survived and I am willing to bet life would have been completely different — less propaganda and more straight news. More oversight of local officials. A better-informed populace. Stronger communities.

I believe with every fiber of my being that we would not have elected a felon, but here we are.

I hope all the people who screamed at me when my paper started charging for online access are enjoying their nice razor subscriptions now, because we’ve cut our own throats.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules.

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist at a dying newspaper with one dream left. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t change their predicament. Darren is a disabled man with a dark past just trying to enjoy his life. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Kaitlyn is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy, the trailer park manager, runs it like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

A version of this piece originally ran on Medium on Nov. 20, 2024.