This data from the Reuters Institute is stark. The pandemic has made printed newspapers a minor source of news, most people get their news online or from television. More than twice as many people get their news via the likes of Twitter and Facebook as from newspapers. So who is really mainstream now?

Guido has been calling newspapers the Dead Tree Press for over a decade. The situation for many national newspapers is dire, year after year of double-digit falling newsstand sales, disappearing local newspapers unable to compete with ultra-local advertising solutions from the tech-media giants which are objectively better than they can provide.  All exacerbated and undercut by unfair competition from the BBC’s monolithic, monocultural empire of local websites and radio stations. The print editions are in a death spiral…

How is the Dead Tree Press coping? They have suspended ABC audited circulation reporting, the transparency* newspapers always call for, is for other people. Not publishing their circulation figures is like not publishing their obituaries. They are still dying.