Are newspapers dead? Or are some no longer newspapers?

There are still almost 1400 daily printed newspapers in the United States. Only a few have actually died in recent years— and the biggest casualties were the second newspapers in what had been two-newspaper cities, including Denver, Seattle, and Tucson. But scores of daily papers have stopped publishing on one or more days each week to save printing and delivery costs on days when they sell the least advertising. These include the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Birmingham News, Press-Register of Mobile, and Huntsville Times—all owned by Advance Publications—which now publish papers only three days a week, posting news on their websites the rest of each week. Two other Advance papers, The Oregonian in Portland and Plain Dealer in Cleveland, publish and deliver home editions four days a week, putting smaller editions on newsstands the other days. The Advance newspapers' journalists now put all of their news on their websites, while small separate editorial staffs select some of it to be published in their print editions. The jointly operated Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News follow a similar pattern, having reduced home delivery of printed papers to just three days a week.

In addition to losing half their advertising revenue and cutting their newsroom staffs by 40% in the decade between 2005 and 2015, newspapers lost half of their print circulation during that time. Even with the addition of digital subscriptions in recent years, average paid daily circulation for US newspapers fell from 54.6 million in 2004 to 29.1 million in 2014, according to authoritative news media analyst Alan Mutter. At the same time, unpaid digital exposure of their news content in a variety of ways has actually increased audiences for newspaper- produced journalism, even though much of that is sporadic viewing via links from other websites and social media. Eight of every ten adults online in August 2014 viewed at least some newspaper digital content, according to comScore digital data released by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). A 2014 Scarborough Research study for the NAA shows that 55% of the total audience for newspaper journalism still read it in print, 30% both in print and on digital devices, and 15% only on digital devices.

Many newspaper owners have focused on cutting costs to remain at least marginally profitable by further shrinking their news staffs and reducing pay—which has significantly degraded the quantity and quality of their news coverage— and eliminating days of print publishing while doing little more digitally than posting their content on websites. Many others are claiming to be converting themselves into "digital first" news organizations, but these initiatives sometimes appear to be primarily cost-cutting in digital dress. Only a relatively small number so far are investing in more ambitious transformations from traditional newspapers into innovative digital news organizations.

In 2015, Gannett, the largest US newspaper publisher as measured by paid circulation, spun off its then eighty-two newspapers, including USA Today, into a separate company from its forty-three television stations. It also made the latest in a series of deep news staff and salary cuts and directed many of its newspapers to become "newsrooms of the future," in which editors would be eliminated or repurposed, reporters would post unedited stories directly online, and much of what they cover would be dictated by what audience metrics show that readers prefer on their websites.

Journalists at the Gannett newspapers were instructed to reapply for fewer jobs. For example, at Gannett's Indianapolis Star, which employed 275 journalists in 2000, the 124 remaining staff members were told to compete for 106 jobs in 2014. "Every job has been redefined," Kate Marymount, Gannett's vice president for news, told the Columbia Journalism Review. "That's why everyone applies for a new job. There are some smaller number of jobs, so not everyone will find a job."

Amalie Nash, editor and vice president for audience engagement at Gannett's Des Moines Register in Iowa, told the Columbia Journalism Review that she was reducing the number of newsroom "middle managers," including traditional assignment editors. "Instead you have content strategists and coaches who work with teams of reporters on what they're covering," she said, "how to reach certain audiences, how to respond to what they're hearing through metrics and feedback and everything else."

After most local Gannett newspapers drastically deemphasized or eliminated national and foreign news, USA Today began in 2014 to insert a daily summary section of its national, international, financial, and lifestyle news into Gannett newspapers and their websites. Larry Kramer, who was then publisher of USA Today, said this enabled local Gannett papers to devote more resources to local news. It also increased USA

Today's print and digital audience, the largest in the country, for marketing to advertisers.

Advance Publications, privately owned by the Newhouse family, has gone further and re-oriented its thirty-three newspapers in eleven states to feed twelve local and regional news websites designed to be "new digitally focused news and information companies." Home delivery of the printed newspapers was eliminated several days a week to "free up millions of dollars to invest in our digital operations," according to an internal 2013 progress report memo from Randy Siegel, president of Advance Local. Newsroom staffs were cut drastically, some by well over half, leaving Advance journalists to work collectively in places like Alabama, where its news operations at the Birmingham, Huntsville, and Mobile newspapers were effectively subsumed into its Al.com digital site. As at many other newspapers across the country, Advance journalists are encouraged to help increase traffic on its websites by frequently posting breaking news, updates, blogs, photos, and responses to reader comments on the Advance websites, in addition to using social media to draw attention to their work.

The rhythms of newspaper newsrooms are now dictated by peak audience periods on the Internet—early morning, lunchtime, and just after school and work in many places—rather than the traditional evening deadlines for morning papers. Journalists working overnight may have deadlines around dawn. Others may face multiple deadlines—late morning and late afternoon, for example—for different digital and then print versions of developing stories. The smaller number of editors in most newsrooms handles both digital and print content. New jobs have been created for social media engagement, maximization of web traffic, creation of innovative blogs, and other digital journalism, and the production of videos, audio podcasts, and video news shows for the newspapers' websites.

Although there are many similarities in the ways various newsrooms are trying to transform themselves from traditional newspapers into multiplatform digital news organizations, there are not yet proven models, as there were in the newspapers' advertising-subsidized print past. So far, there are differences in the mix of print and digital audiences and revenue, in the speed and kinds of digital innovation, and in the amounts of new investments, if any. In particular, The Washington Post and The New York Times, with large national audiences, have drawn considerable attention for their approaches to digital transformation.

At The Post, Jeff Bezos injected new money and ambition into digital change that had begun before he bought the newspaper in 2013 from the public company (now Graham Holdings) controlled by Donald Graham and his family. In 2014, The Post hired more than one hundred people in its newsroom, reversing a long period of steady contraction. It opened software and audience development labs in New York and further integrated web developers with editors and reporters in its Washington newsroom to help develop a steady stream of innovative digital journalism for a fast-growing worldwide audience. Half of the fifty million unique visitors to The Post's digital sites in July 2015 came from tablets and smartphones, much of that through web searches and social media links. The Post's Newspaper Partner Program gave its digital national and international news to subscribers of the paid websites of more than 250 US daily newspapers, reaching an additional tens of thousands of digitally identifiable consumers of The Post's journalism.

The New York Times refocused its newsroom on digital transformation in 2014, after The New York Times Company decided to concentrate its resources on the newspaper and its digital sites, selling off the Boston Globe, a group of regional newspapers, and other holdings. The Times had already established one of the first and most successful digital news paywalls, with one million paid digital subscribers in 2015. The Times commissioned a 96-page report in 2014 from a newsroom committee that noted "traditional competitors like The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial

Times, and The Guardian are moving aggressively to remake themselves as digital first—digital reports that also produce newspapers, rather than the other way around." In response to the report's recommendations, The Times reorganized its newsroom leadership to add senior editors in charge of digital strategy, interactive news technology, and audience development, plus new digital editors in all of its nine news departments.

Nearly half of the 70,000 journalists working at American news organizations are still in the newsrooms of newspapers and their digital operations. And those newsrooms, despite all their contraction and digital challenges, still originate much of the news that Americans see in print, on the Internet, and even on television. Should they still be called newspapers? They still publish some of their news in print. They still deliver it to some homes on paper, if not every day everywhere. Half of people who read news read it on paper only and another 30% read it both on paper and online. On the other hand, practically all firms that publish news on paper also publish online, though some do so more vigorously than others, seeing their websites as a creative opportunity for better reporting. They are becoming multimedia, multiplatform news organizations whose shapes are still evolving. Newspapers? Newspapers on the road to multimedia news organizations.