To the memory of JFF and his acerbic wisdom

On a late morning in January 2007, I visited Jean-François Fogel at what then were the offices of Lemonde.fr in Paris. He showed me around and then went for lunch. We had first met at the tenth anniversary of Clarin.com a few years prior, where the two of us and Dan Gilmour spoke at a panel on digital journalism. We hit it off immediately and made a point of trying to get together when we coincided in Paris, Buenos Aires, or Chicago. We talked about the news, technology, culture, and politics for hours. Halfway through our conversation during that lunch, he said something I will never forget: “You know, Pablo, one day we might witness the closing of the shop. Somebody will turn off the lights and voilá!”

This year I taught my Sociology of Online News class at Northwestern University after a three-year hiatus. I found myself returning to Jean-François’ premonition time and again while preparing for class, as well as during class discussions. What if we are witnessing the “closing of the shop”? What if this is the beginning of the end for the news media as we have known it for more than one hundred years? What if there is no audience and revenue model to sustain the news media as sizable and thriving sector of society and the economy?

Yes, we will always have news, since most people will want to know about what interests them. Yes, we will always have journalists, since some people will be able to make a living telling those stories. Yes, we will always have some news organizations capable of being economically successful. But there are trends that suggest that there might not be enough market demand to keep the news media alive as both an institutionalized part of the information ecosystem and a viable sector of the economy for much longer.

To begin, the decrease in employment within news organizations during the first quarter of the twenty-first century has been staggering. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States, there has been a 79% decrease in employment in newspapers from 2000 to 2024. While there have been some gains in employment in digital news outlets, the overall trend is one of significant job losses across the news media: the Pew Research Center reported that total newsroom positions in the United States went from 114,260 in 2008 to 84,620 in 2020.

Not only are there fewer journalists employed in news organizations, there are also fewer news organizations employing them. The 2024 State of Local News Report documents the closure of 130 newspapers that year, and of more than 3,200 ones since 2005. Surely there are digital-only ventures employing some journalists, but the size of their revenue and labor force is a fraction of what is lost through newspaper closures. The loss of traditional media dollars and jobs has not been offset by the respective digital media gains.

Jobs have disappeared and organizations have folded because there has not been enough revenue to sustain them. The rise of online news meant the near disappearance of classified ads first, and the shrinking of display ads later. In response, news organizations have switched to subscription-based models. But even that has not been enough to stop the bleeding. The 2025 Digital News Report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism notes an average of fewer than 1 in 5 news consumers subscribing for news across all countries included in the survey. Furthermore, most subscriptions go to a handful of players in each market, leaving most competitor scrambling for those revenues.

But even the most successful sites in terms of subscription revenues cannot sustain sizable enterprises with that money. Consider The New York Times. It is arguably the leading news organization in the English-speaking language, if not worldwide, and is often seen as the poster child of a thriving subscription strategy. However, most of the revenues for the organization come from its games. Yes, for all its journalistic might, from an economic standpoint the Times is a gaming company. In other words, its journalism is in no small measure a cross-subsidy of its consumers’ desire to play — and only secondarily to learn about “all the news that’s fit to print.” What would happen to its journalism if gaming competitors lured most of its consumers away with more fun and engaging options?

The collapse of the labor force, the shrinking of the organizational field, the fall of revenues, all of that was evident by 2024. And 2025 added what might well be the final blow: The incorporation of AI-powered search results has been tied to massive two-digit decreases in traffic to news sites, even among the top players. Type anything about a current event into Google and you’ll get an AI-powered summary that appears to be enough to satiate the news appetite of a sizable fraction of those making queries.

The summaries include links to sites providing more information, but not enough users are clicking on them. It is reasonable to expect that the more people get used to that level and style of information, the less they will crave more in the future. If that expectation materializes, it is not too far-fetched to envision 2026 as the year in which the closure of the shop might begin. Surely, many lights will remain on at first, only to be turned off later. And as time goes by, we will gradually get used to living in a penumbra.