The soaring cost of newsprint is contributing to the slow death of America’s newspapers, reports The Washington Post, which stated that a months-long spike in the price of paper, “driven by federal tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Canadian suppliers, is slamming newspapers at a time when the news about the news industry wasn’t very good to begin with.
“Newspapers, magazines and print advertisers have seen the cost of their most basic commodity rise at double-digit rates since the Commerce Department began imposing the tariffs in March on Canadian imports, by far the publishing industry’s dominant paper source.
“The result has been a kind of slow-motion breakdown for newspapers, long beset by declining ad revenue and disappearing readers.
But, the International Trade Commission reached a final, unanimous decision that the U.S. paper industry is not harmed by imports of Canadian uncoated groundwood paper, including newsprint.
This decision means that the tariffs levied over the past few months will stop, and the cash deposits from those tariffs will be refunded to newsprint manufacturers (though that will take several months). The ITC will release a final report on September 17th that will clarify its reasoning on this issue.
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