The New York Times prints for about 4% of its subscribers now (their own Q2 2026 numbers put print at 550,000 out of 13.35 million total). The other 96% read digital only. That’s not a hypothetical trend line. That’s where the highest-profile paywall in the industry landed after more than a decade of tightening its meter. Meanwhile, a legacy print publisher with a healthy digital subscription base recently announced it’s shutting down entirely, done in by debt that came due all at once.
Two outcomes. Same industry, same decade.
On the latest episode of the Paywall Podcast, Pete and Tyler go through ten years of stories about publishers who kept printing, publishers who quit, and publishers who found a third option: shrinking their print run and charging a lot more for it.
Listen to the full episode: The Print Decision, Stop, Shrink, or Charge More
They walk through a decade of print-to-digital transitions they’ve watched up close at Leaky Paywall, from newspapers that closed to a magazine that raised its price 4x and kept its print edition alive. If you’re wondering whether to stop printing, cut back, or hold the line, this one’s for you.
Why Print Is Bleeding Out
Tyler estimates that one or two local newspapers close in the US every week, and he’s quick to admit the real number might be higher. The math behind it is brutal: print is the biggest cost on a publisher’s books, and for a lot of small papers, the only thing keeping the presses running at all is public notice revenue (the legal notices governments are required to publish). Most states require 12 straight months of print before you even qualify for that income, which traps some publishers into printing long after it stops making sense.
Not every print shutdown ends badly. A small mom-and-pop paper in West Virginia dropped print years ago and never looked back. It’s still growing, slowly, as a lean, remote, digital-only operation. The difference between that story and a publisher going under is rarely the decision to stop. It’s whether you had a plan for what came next.
There’s a Framework, Not a Guess
You don’t have to guess your way into this decision. Three questions settle it: does ad revenue actually carry your print product, is your content the transactional kind people skim (news) or the kind people sit down with (a magazine, where the print product often is the product), and are your readers attached enough to the print format that they won’t follow you online. Three publishers we’ve worked with answered those questions three different ways, and all three are still standing.
Three Publishers, Three Decisions
Stop. Brew Your Own and Winemaker went cold turkey on print a year ago. They lost a percentage of their readership in the switch (it wasn’t nothing, but it wasn’t a collapse either), and they’ve fully rebuilt that base in the year since.
Shrink. Track and Field News stopped printing for nine months and found out the hard way that half their audience, skewed older, just didn’t want to log into anything digital. One reader loved the magazine so much he paid FedEx to print and ship him every digital issue himself, for about $100 a month. So they brought print back, but smaller: print-on-demand instead of a full run. They also raised their price from $29 a year to $138, a jump of roughly 4-5x, and it’s a real profit center now.
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Charge more. My Villager, a weekly paper in Saint Paul, used to give away 30,000 copies a week for free through retail stores and live entirely on ad revenue. When that ad revenue started dropping, they made one of the biggest reversals we’ve seen: they told readers directly that survival meant charging for access, then started charging for both print and digital subscriptions. The response, in Pete’s words, was “take my money.” They now run a paid, twice-a-month print edition alongside digital subscriptions that carry the business.
None of these publishers guessed. They looked at their ad revenue, their content, and their readers, then picked a lane on purpose.
Is your print product actually your product, or is it just the delivery vehicle for your product? That question, more than any revenue spreadsheet, is usually what decides whether stopping print feels like a loss or a relief.
Watch the full conversation:
