Online publications are becoming more and more popular. Being available from anywhere at any time is something that is hard to replicate with physical media. Paper publication numbers are decreasing while more and more people have smartphones. What does this mean for the future of paper publications?

People are finding themselves going to news websites like The New York Times, CNN and others to fulfil their news needs. This means less people are subscribing to paper copies of newspapers, instead they are subscribing to online forms of the publication. 

374 thousand copies of the New York Times were distributed in 2020, this is a significant drop from 906 thousand just 10 years earlier and continues the downward trend. 

Newspapers are finding it harder and harder to hand out hard copies of their newspapers, and while this could mean the start of the end of hard copy newspapers, many people rely on other forms like broadcast or radio to gain their news. We did a little poll amongst the PCM High School students and found that only 2 out of 10 students actually read hard copies of the newspaper. The other 8 students said they rely on other forms of media. 

“Newspapers don’t really pique my interest and I rely on other things to get the news that’s going on around the arena,” senior Anothony Savala stated. 

Senior Delaney Baird said, ”I get my news from reading Facebook articles. I don’t read the newspapers because we don’t subscribe to them.”   

English teacher Kennedy Horton stated she gets her news from televised news broadcasts and social media, 

“I follow KCCI on Facebook and get most of my news from social media outlets rather than subscribing to physical copies of a newspaper.”

Local newspapers like the Des Moines Register are seeing a downward trend in the sales of printed papers. 

What does this mean for the future of newspaper subscriptions? Is it the beginning of the end of physical copies or is this merely a hiccup in the long road of the history of newspapers?