Black and White and Not Read All Over

There’s at least one sector that is not likely to see a return to pre-pandemic levels when the COVID era ends and that is newspapers.

This is a segment of the media that has not been able to keep up to changes in technology and consumer habits and the bleeding only got worse during COVID. And now StatsCan has come out with a report suggesting things are not going to get any better.

Operating revenues fell more than 20-percent last year for Canadian newspapers. Here on the Prairies the decline was a more severe at 27-percent. This report on the state of the newspaper industry from StatsCan suggests that while advertising revenues will go up after COVID, newspapers will not gain as much as other media segments such as radio, television and internet.

The report’s broad message is that consumer news consumption habits are changing. That was the trend before COVID, it accelerated through the pandemic and while newspapers have had some success shifting their readers to an electronic format those subscribers account for only 12-percent of circulation revenues.