"The newspaper is dying. I'm not sure there will be newspapers and its one business I'd never be in"

Sumner Redstone’s statement reads as both a market judgment and a cultural forecast. He isn’t predicting the end of journalism; he is diagnosing the collapse of a particular industrial configuration: ink, presses, fleets of trucks, and a two-sided advertising model that once subsidized civic reporting. By saying he wouldn’t invest, he distinguishes between a cyclical downturn and a structural unraveling, the kind investors avoid because the fundamental economics have shifted.

The backbone of newspapers, scarcity, vanished. Classifieds moved to Craigslist and niche marketplaces; display ads migrated to platforms that target users with precision and at scale. Attention fragmented across screens; the bundled package of general-interest content lost its pricing power. Even loyal readers learned to expect abundance without friction, while the marginal cost of distribution online undermined the rationale for a daily print artifact. Debt-fueled consolidation left many chains unable to invest in digital transformation, accelerating decline.

Yet the obituary for “newspapers” shouldn’t be misread as an obituary for news. Some legacy papers reinvented themselves as digital-first brands with global reach, subscriber-led economics, and product mindsets, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal exemplify this. Others found lifelines through philanthropy, billionaire patrons, or membership models. The surviving playbooks favor niche authority, habit-forming products, and diversified revenue, subscriptions, events, audio, games, over the old dependence on ads alone.

Redstone’s bluntness also exposes a democratic dilemma: market logic reallocates capital away from public goods. When local papers wither, news deserts grow, corruption risks rise, and civic participation falls. The platform era’s efficiency can be socially costly, and algorithmic intermediation weakens publishers’ bargaining power even as it amplifies reach.

Seen that way, the “death” he names is the shedding of a vessel. The function, rigorous reporting, migrates to new forms: newsletters, podcasts, local nonprofit newsrooms, and nimble digital chains. Investment follows growth, not nostalgia. The challenge is ensuring that what replaces print’s business model still funds the accountability work a healthy society requires.