In March of this year, more people read the news online than ever before. Despite many newspapers and magazines lowering their paywalls for coverage of the pandemic, record numbers of people parted with their cash to subscribe. But something is clearly broken; in the face of soaring readership, the press is reckoning with an existential threat. Online ad revenue - which should be booming in response to surging online traffic -has plummeted. Advertisers, feeling the pandemic's economic pinch, have slashed their spend, and of the ads there are, many are blocked from appearing alongside articles containing specific words, including 'pandemic' and 'Oovid-19' as well as 'Black Lives Matter' and 'protest'. With shops closed and newsstands empty, print sales of British newspapers have dropped by up to two fifths and income from printed ads has fallen by a colossal 80 per cent since mid March.The most extraordinary, turbulent and newsworthy era of a generation is, with the heaviest irony, spelling the end for journalism. But the press - including newspapers as well as magazines - was not exactly in rude health before the pandemic; the coronavirus is in fact speeding up a collapse that has been in motion for decades. Globally, despite steadily increasing digital readership, press revenue has been sinking, driven primarily by the dwindling of print advertising. While 'information' has never felt more readily available and present, the reputable sources of this information are reducing in number and under threat; between 2004 and 2018, one in five newspapers in the US shut down due to lack of funds.
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