Last year John Oliver, host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, did a segment on journalism, specifically, how important newspapers are to all media that report news stories.
Oliver is a popular figure for millennials. One poll found Last Week Tonight to be in the top 20 go-to news sources for the generation.
Although in the segment Oliver pokes fun at the fact that people categorize him as a journalist. In one interview he told a reporter that, “It’s not journalism, it’s comedy first, and it’s comedy second.”
Journalist or not, John Oliver knows how to appeal to younger audiences with his witty remarks and entertaining satire.
He knows who his audience is, people who have mostly moved on from print news sources and rely on social media to lead them to other articles and videos. It can be guessed that a large portion of the millions of people who have watched the segment on Youtube and HBO did not know the importance of newspapers, so Last Week Tonight is the perfect place to inform people of the significance of the newspaper industry.
Newspapers, both local and large scale, are the backbone of news circulation. They hire journalists to do research that other sources like Last Week Tonight and cable news programs use.
Unfortunately, most newspaper companies have been seeing their profits diminish throughout the years. Even with the large increase in cyber activity, online advertisements do not provide enough revenue to make up for the loss in print revenue.
Getting news for free is now customary in our digital culture. Even going as far as using ad blockers so we don’t have to see advertisements appear around the borders while reading online articles.
Although some sites have ad blocker detectors that require people to turn off the extensions before viewing their content. Last March the New York Times showed messages saying things like, “The best things in life aren’t free…Advertising helps us fund our journalism,” then gave the reader an option to disable their ad blocker or subscribe to the newspaper.
In Oliver’s segment he comments, “A big part of the blame for this industry’s dire straits is on us and our unwillingness to pay for the work that journalists produce. We’ve just grown accustomed to getting our news for free. And the longer that we get something for free, the less willing we are to pay for it.”
It is understandable why so many people have gotten ad blockers, advertisements are annoying. They are intrusive and get in the way of reading articles or watching videos. People are using ad blockers as a way to fight against the increasingly invasive advertisements.
And according to research done in 2016 by the Pew Research Center, the younger people are, the less likely they are to read daily newspapers.
But millennials are not the only ones who are causing this decline, newspapers are slowly losing all their audiences. 
Publishers need money somehow. And if people are not subscribing to print media like they used to, combined with users blocking their sources of online revenue, the future seems bleak for journalism.