A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current

events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can
cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports, art, and science. They
often include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local
services, obituaries, birth notices, crosswords, editorial cartoons, comic strips,
and advice columns.

Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture
of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue.
The journalism organizations that publish newspapers are themselves
often metonymically called newspapers. Newspapers have traditionally been
published in print (usually on cheap, low-grade paper called newsprint). However, today
most newspapers are also published on websites as online newspapers, and some
have even abandoned their print versions entirely.

Newspapers developed in the 17th century as information sheets for merchants. By the
early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America,
published newspapers. Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high
journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. With the
popularity of the Internet, many newspapers are now digital, with their news presented
online as the main medium that most of the readers use, with the print edition being
secondary (for the minority of customers that choose to pay for it) or, in some cases,
retired. The decline of newspapers in the early 21st century was at first largely
interpreted as a mere print-versus-digital contest in which digital beats print. The reality
is different and multivariate, as newspapers now routinely have online presence;
anyone willing to subscribe can read them digitally online. Factors such as classified
ads no longer being a large revenue center (because of other ways to buy and sell
online) and ad impressions now being dispersed across many media are inputs.

Newspapers are typically published daily or weekly. News magazines are also weekly,
but they have a magazine format. General-interest newspapers typically publish news
articles and feature articles on national and international news as well as local news.
The news includes political events and personalities, business and finance, crime,
weather, and natural disasters; health and medicine, science, and computers and
technology; sports; and entertainment, society, food and cooking, clothing and home
fashion, and the arts.

Usually, the paper is divided into sections for each of those major groupings (labelled A,
B, C, and so on, with pagination prefixes yielding page numbers A1-A20, B1-B20, C1-
C20, and so on). Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page
containing editorials written by an editor (or by the paper's editorial board) and
expressing an opinion on a public issue, opinion articles called "op-eds" written by guest
writers (which are typically in the same section as the editorial), and columns that
express the personal opinions of columnists, usually offering analysis and synthesis that
attempts to translate the raw data of the news into information telling the reader "what it
all means" and persuading them to concur. Papers also include articles that have
no byline; these articles are written by staff writers.
A wide variety of material has been published in newspapers. Besides the
aforementioned news, information and opinions, they include weather forecasts;
criticism and reviews of the arts (including literature, film, television, theater, fine arts,
and architecture) and of local services such as restaurants; obituaries, birth notices and
graduation announcements; entertainment features such as crosswords,
horoscopes, editorial cartoons, gag cartoons, and comic strips; advice columns, food,
and other columns; and radio and television listings (program schedules). Newspapers
have classified ad sections where people and businesses can buy small advertisements
to sell goods or services; as of 2013, an increase in Internet websites for selling goods,
such as Craigslist and eBay has led to significantly less classified ad sales for
newspapers.[citation needed]

Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture
of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue (other businesses or
individuals pay to place advertisements in the pages, including display ads, classified
ads, and their online equivalents). Some newspapers are government-run or at least
government-funded; their reliance on advertising revenue and profitability is less critical
to their survival. The editorial independence of a newspaper is thus always subject to
the interests of someone, whether owners, advertisers or a government. Some
newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large
circulation are viewed as newspapers of record.

Many newspapers, besides employing journalists on their own payrolls, also subscribe
to news agencies (wire services) (such as the Associated Press, Reuters, or Agence
France-Presse), which employ journalists to find, assemble, and report the news, then
sell the content to the various newspapers. This is a way to avoid duplicating the
expense of reporting from around the world. c. 2005, there were approximately 6,580
daily newspaper titles in the world selling 395 million print copies a day (in the U.S.,
1,450 titles selling 55 million copies).[1] The late 2000s–early 2010s global recession,
combined with the rapid growth of free web-based alternatives, has helped cause a
decline in advertising and circulation, as many papers had to retrench operations to
stanch the losses.[2] Worldwide annual revenue approached $100 billion in 2005–7, then
plunged during the worldwide financial crisis of 2008–9. Revenue in 2016 fell to only
$53 billion, hurting every major publisher as their efforts to gain online income fell far
short of the goal.[3]

The decline in advertising revenues affected both the print and online media as well as
all other mediums; print advertising was once lucrative but has greatly declined, and the
prices of online advertising are often lower than those of their print precursors. Besides
remodelling advertising, the internet (especially the web) has also challenged the
business models of the print-only era by crowdsourcing both publishing in general
(sharing information with others) and, more specifically, journalism (the work of finding,
assembling, and reporting the news). Besides, the rise of news aggregators, which
bundle linked articles from many online newspapers and other sources, influences the
flow of web traffic. Increasing paywalling of online newspapers may be counteracting
those effects. The oldest newspaper still published is the Ordinari Post Tijdender, which
was established in Stockholm in 1645.
Definitions
[edit]
Newspapers typically meet four criteria:[4][5]

 Public accessibility: Its contents are reasonably accessible to the public, traditionally
by the paper being sold or distributed at newsstands, shops, and libraries, and,
since the 1990s, made available over the Internet with online newspaper websites.
While online newspapers have increased access to newspapers by people with
Internet access, people without Internet or computer access (e.g., homeless
people, impoverished people and people living in remote or rural regions) may not
be able to access the Internet, and thus will not be able to read online
news. Literacy is also a factor that prevents people who cannot read from being able
to benefit from reading newspapers (paper or online).
 Periodicity: They are published at regular intervals, typically daily or weekly. This
ensures that newspapers can provide information on newly emerging news stories
or events.
 Currency: Its information is as up to date as its publication schedule allows. The
degree of up-to-date-ness of a print newspaper is limited by the need for time to
print and distribute the newspaper. In major cities, there may be a morning edition
and a later edition of the same day's paper, so that the later edition can
incorporate breaking news that have occurred since the morning edition was printed.
Online newspapers can be updated as frequently as new information becomes
available, even several times per day, which means that online editions can be very
up-to-date.
 Universality: Newspapers covers a range of topics, from political and business news
to updates on science and technology, arts, culture, and entertainment.