One of the main reasons is the decrease of readers from a few years ago. After a statistic from the Pew Research Center which answers the question of “Where did you get news yesterday?” in 1991 56% of the respondents said that they got them from a newspaper and in 2012 only 29%.
It is not just that less people read press but also that the readers are getting older. Print media is not so appealing to younger generations because they are used to new technology so they are not likely to buy newspapers. As the graphic below shows, generated by the Pew Research Center, we can check this trend that means that in some years the number of readers will keep falling.
Another main problem that print media has to face is the decrease of advertising revenue. Advertising is the most important financial resource for newspapers. So, what happens if the income starts to fall? Survival becomes hard. A mix of other forms in advertising (online and mobile) and the global economic situation are the main reasons for this decrease.
All these factors, less readers, lack of engagement with young people and lower revenue in advertising, have inflicted a big punch to the newspaper industry. According to the Press Association of Madrid, in a recent report created in January 2013, 32 Spanish print newspapers, free and paid papers, have closed in four years, not counting magazines.
Could this crisis make the print media disappear? It is hard to make predictions. Maybe, just maybe, newspapers will turn into content creators supplying critical information for other formats. An evolution in form but not in substance, in order to keep developing its main activity: inform people hoping to create an exigent audience, so the news analysis will not remain as worthless scraps of paper.
