The outlook for American news journalism has significantly shifted over the years. To shed light on what caused this shift, my team at Accenture recently completed an analysis of newspaper revenues over two decades. And while some suggest that tech companies like Google have taken the ad revenue from news publishers, our analysis reveals a more complex story. 

Smartphones and high-speed broadband brought the wonders of the internet to our fingertips. With technological advances have come tremendous volumes of content from around the world — academic sources, specialist and topic-specific news and other content — offering consumers choice about how, where and in what format they access content. 

This availability of digital news and other content has fragmented audiences and, in turn, advertiser revenue and balance sheets shrunk. Thousands of American journalists have been laid off, and the industry has consolidated as publishers cut costs. 

Now, with a growing debate about how tomorrow’s news industry should be shaped, it’s important to consider how digitization brought change to the news business of today. 

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