In 2000, USA Today was the most circulated newspaper in the United States. More than 1.6 million copies were printed each day. Over 6.6 million readers picked it up. It sat in every hotel lobby and at every airport gate. It was the newsprint on the hands of every business traveler sitting on airplanes waiting to take off. USA Today wasn’t just a newspaper — it was the country’s shorthand for news you could trust and easily consume.
It was also the industry’s master class in brand building. It scaled fast. It distributed wide. It nailed the format. But two decades of digital rewrote the rules.
At the end of 2024, USA Today’s daily print circulation had collapsed to 132,640 — a 92% drop. Its digital subscriber base of 2 million feels like a bright spot…until you follow the money. The revenue from those subscriptions and online ads doesn’t come close to the dollars that print once brought in. USA Today no longer carries the financial weight of the Gannett empire. It is now just one of many titles inside a portfolio whose revenue appears to be slowing.
Two decades of digital rewrote the rules.
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Gannett’s quarterly revenue in 2000 was $1.36 billion. Annual revenues hit $3.3 billion in 213. It is expected to end 2025 somewhere between $2.4 and $2.5 billion. USA Today doesn’t break out its numbers. It doesn’t have to. The trajectory seems to tell the story.
But this isn’t just a USA Today story. It is the story of the newspaper industry.
In this story, even the biggest players with the deepest pockets struggled to adapt. Local papers, with smaller ambitions and lower overhead, found niche relevance. But the middle, once rich with reader loyalty and ad dollars, got squeezed out. Too generic to keep an audience. Too burdened with legacy to move at the pace of industry change.
The same forces may now be at work in banking.
Digital Starts to Dominate
Chime, a mobile-first banking platform with no branches, went public on June 12, 2025, in an oversubscribed IPO. Its market cap on day one surpassed that of long-established regional banks that have been around six times longer with better balance sheets. Today it trades with a valuation that is more than two-thirds of many of those traditional challengers.
That’s not because Chime reinvented banking. It didn’t. In fact, it offers only a fraction of the products and services found at most traditional banks. But it rethought how banking is delivered. It provides what consumers who felt underserved by traditional banks care about most, delivered through the device they also use the most. Chime reports that it has become the primary bank for 67% of its customers. But not by expanding the breadth of services, but by getting a few things right that its target customers value.
Wall Street appears to be betting on that formula. That mobile-first “neobank” platforms like Chime and others can stand up new products faster and at lower cost. That many traditional…
