During the second half of the twentieth century, now remembered in the newspaper business as a golden age, the position of newspapers was already weakening, Brock argues, mainly because of the advent of radio and television. In the US, newspaper sales per thousand people fell by 55 per cent from 1950 to 2008. The trouble wasn’t obvious at first, because economies in the developed world were generally growing, populations were rising, advertising revenues were increasing, and the losses in newspaper audience came mostly in the form of the weaker papers going out of business (London had more than fifty daily papers 200 years ago) while the more established papers grew. By, say, 1975, it had become just about impossible for a new entrant to start a big daily newspaper or a television station, because of prohibitively high costs and regulatory barriers. Protected from competition, news organizations, for one historical season, were able to assemble, print and deliver a big collection of information people wanted and could not get from anywhere else – sports scores, movie times, stock prices, as well as more conventional news – into an unbreakable package. This allowed them to charge substantial fees to advertisers and subscribers.
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