Investigating a changing media landscape in the face of media illiteracy

In doing so, I have gained a new understanding of how this industry functions, relatively similar to a living organism — it must be constantly sustained to stay alive and prosper. And the people who must‬‭ sustain the media architecture we desire are journalists and the rest of the public. I wish to continue this‬‭ investigation and maintain my attention on this growing problem while also enlisting others to raise their‬‭ own concerns.

Join me in the fight against media illiteracy, and in doing so, help make our newsrooms‬‭ and communities live in tandem once again.‬

‭ I hope you enjoy,‬

‭ Aubree Wood.‬

By AUBREE WOOD
Special to the Ramspondents

Both the parking lots and the streets that I drove past to get to the warehouse were empty. 

Were the people in the cars I did pass still up from the night before? Or had they also woken up at the ungodly hour of 2 a.m. to start their day, alongside the newspaper delivery carriers?

As my car pulled into the Greeley Newspaper Distribution center at 2:54 a.m., I parked and waited for Shane Merrill to arrive. I greeted him with as much excitement as I could muster; my energy consistent with the amount of sleep I had gotten and the time of day. We entered through the loading dock and into the large warehouse holding all the papers needing distribution within the Northern Colorado area. 

The warehouse was big and gray. Individual stations, where each carrier wraps and bags their papers, lined the walls. In the corner stood bins of past newspapers awaiting their fate to the paper shredder. 

We were the only two in the warehouse at that hour. I asked Merrill when the other carriers would come in to begin their shift. “They already came in starting around 12-1 a.m.,” he told me in response. 

Merrill methodically ties up and bags each individual paper, throwing them into bins to later bring to his car. 

At around 3:15 a.m. two more employees entered the warehouse. “Good morning!,” Merrill said. 

This is a typical morning shift for them. They were here yesterday and will be here tomorrow. Someone has to deliver the papers, even if the subscriber base has significantly decreased, someone still has to do this job. 

Like most people my age, I could not tell you the last time I opened up a physical newspaper in order to obtain my news. Instead, I open my phone, attempt to avoid sources with paywalls and read news from all over the country, instead of stories from my local community. 

As a child I was always fascinated by the newspaper delivery system, who wrote the stories, who dropped off the papers, and why my father couldn’t wait five minutes after waking up to start reading. I would watch him from the corner of my eye as I tried to balance my attention from the cartoons on TV to him sitting in his chair, coffee in hand, and absorbed in the black and white text in front of him. I fantasized about the days when that would be my routine, but now signing up for a print subscription to my local paper seems like a waste when I could just read updated news on my phone within a matter of seconds. 

A study conducted by the Pew Research Center in October of 2025 found that 56% of Americans feel that they can trust national media outlets – down 11% since March of 2025. So what happens when individuals are increasingly losing trust in national media organizations and end up with no place to turn to for good local news? How can we turn our support back to independent local media and all those who make it happen? 

At 3:30 in the morning, Merrill loaded up the backseat of his car with the papers that would soon be distributed to the subscribers located along the Timnath route. The streets were still empty, and the sky still dark. As we approached the first house, Merrill rolled down the windows, and the cool night air engulfed the heated car. Before I could blink, Merrill had reached into the backseat, grabbed a paper, and thrown it out his window with the precision and power of a professional football player. 

Merrill has been working in the world of newspaper distribution for the past 25 years. What started as a college odd job to help pay the bills turned into a life of dedication and service to his local community. 

“It was always just a side job, additional money. It was just easy work. You know, you just lose time and hours of sleep, essentially. But you fill that in with a little bit of money, and it's always helped out with the bills,” Merrill said.  

Merrill initially went to school for engineering, and for 10 years of his career he balanced the largest route in southeast Fort Collins at the time while still working a nine-hour job as an engineer in Denver. 

“I would get up at 1:30 in the morning, do the paper route, go work my nine-to-ten hour engineering job in Denver, and then come back home, do whatever I needed with the family, go back to bed, wake up, and do it again, seven days a week.

“At that time, it was a route of about six to seven hundred papers every day. Right now we’re looking at a saturation of 150 to 200 papers on any given route,” Merrill said. 

It is no surprise that print newspaper subscriptions are on the decline, but those facing the economic brunt of this truth are the newspaper carriers that deliver those papers to the public. Carriers get paid per paper, per subscriber, and they are fiscally penalized for complaints and missed deliveries.

Despite the continuous decline in paper subscriptions, the route mileage remains the same, just with fewer doorsteps to deliver to and make money from. 

“The cost of living is up, and gas is a lot more expensive. And paper subscription pricing has gone up dramatically in just the last five years. So what that's doing is causing less subscribers to subscribe, and that's how we get paid. On the delivery side, we get paid per paper. So, for example, five years ago, we had a street that had six customers on it. That's great. We're getting paid six times for going down that one street. Now, five years later, we only have one subscriber on that street. So in relation to making money, we're now making six times less for that exact same drive, the exact same mile we're doing on the same route. So the money's gone down while the cost of living has gone up, that is the biggest challenge,” Merrill added. 

“Throw it like a Frisbee,” Merrill said to me as he handed me a paper and rolled down the passenger-side window. 

“Aim for the garage door; the subscribers like the consistency,” he added before I attempted to throw.

The plastic bag holding the paper flew into the air and landed right in the middle of the driveway. Not on target. I looked to Merrill, who brushed it off and assured me it was a skill that came with years of practice and technique. 

As the route continued, both Merrill and I were slinging papers out the windows with great speed. (OK, maybe more so him than me but nonetheless, the papers were being delivered.) 

In the middle of the route we entered a gated senior community. What was once a route with a drop-off location every three to five minutes became a frenzy of subscriber saturation. 

A 2025 study from the Pew Research Center found that 7% of Americans turn to print news subscriptions to obtain their news, compared to 86% who say they usually obtain their news via smartphones or other electronics. 

What seems to be holding the newspaper distribution industry together are the older generations. And as those demographics begin to dwindle, there are not enough young people subscribing to maintain a steady subscriber population. 

“I would say there's still one more generation behind them that still has value to that paper, that physical paper in their hand. But the push to digital, social media, it's all there. I mean, it is going away. There's going to be no replacing the amount of subscribers, so that decline is just always going to be there, and it's going to be up to the publishers, or possibly the hedge funds, because those hedge funds now own the major publications,” Merrill said.

As the route began to come to a close, Merrill was interrupted by a phone call from another carrier, who was delivering papers in Loveland and was later supposed to head to Estes Park for deliveries. A problem had occurred. The carrier’s car began to have problems while she was wrapping up her route in Loveland. 

“When stuff like this happens, I’m the manager; I have to take care of it, so after I finish this route, I’ll have to meet her and pick up the remaining papers to finish that route. That's just sometimes how this business goes,” Merrill added. 

It is clear to see that unless communities re-immerse themselves in the art that is print media, publications are going to have no choice but to close their printing presses. But what can be done in the age of digitized news? And how can we support those that do this important work for our communities? 

We simply need more individuals invested and curious about local news and what is happening now in their communities. By doing this we can hopefully produce communities that are empathetic and knowledgeable about the news that matters to them in their own towns and cities. It is important that we immerse ourselves in as much local media as possible, especially in this age of nationalized and even globalized news outlets. Change starts local, and that is what our communities need to remember when our news outlets are teetering on economic uncertainty. 

This project originated from the CSU Journalism and Media Communication Department class “Online Storytelling and Audience Engagement,” taught by Michelle Ancell.