Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

By 2013, total US newspaper print ad revenue had declined by 70% over the previous decade, and online ads had contributed back only $3.4 billion of the $40 billion lost in annual sales. A saying emerged in the newspaper industry that “print dollars were being replaced by digital dimes.” From 2007 to 2011, 13,400 newspaper newsroom jobs were cut in the United States. Help-wanted classified ad revenue dropped by more than 90% in the decade after 2000, from $8.7 billion to $723 million. Newspaper companies including the Tucson Citizen (Arizona’s oldest continuously published daily newspaper) and the Rocky Mountain News went bankrupt. Others, like the McClatchy Company, lost more than 90% of their value. On August 5, 2013, the Washington Post made a surprise announcement that it had been acquired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. Similar patterns held in magazine publishing, with total circulation and advertising revenue in precipitous decline. The parent companies of magazines as diverse as Penthouse (General Media) and the National Enquirer and Men’s Fitness (American Media) declared bankruptcy. Newsweek, which had been in print since 1933 and at one point had a circulation of 3.3 million, saw its total circulation dropped by more than 50% between 2007 and 2011 and ceased publishing a print edition altogether in 2012. The New Republic, a once influential political magazine (in the mid-1990s it had a reputation for being “required reading on Air Force One”) was...