America's dying newspapers

"In the main it is correct to say that the decreasing number of newspapers in our larger American cities is due to the enormously increased cost of maintaining great dailies.  This has been found to limit the number which a given advertising territory will support.  It is a fact too that there are few other fields of enterprise in which so many unprofitable enterprises are maintained.  There is one penny daily in New York which has not paid a cent to its owners in twenty years during that time its income has met its expenses only once.  Another of our New York dailies loses between four and five hundred thousand dollars a year if well founded report is correct but the deficit is cheerfully met each year.  It may be safely stated that scarcely half of our New York morning and evening newspapers return an adequate profit." —The Atlantic monthly, 1918