Newspaper. A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, sports, art, and science. They often include materials such as opinion columns, weather forecasts, reviews of local services, obituaries, birth notices, crosswords, editorial cartoons, comic strips, and advice columns. Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue. The journalism organizations that publish newspapers are themselves often metonymically called newspapers. Newspapers have traditionally been published in print. However, today most newspapers are also published on websites as online newspapers, and some have even abandoned their print versions entirely. Newspapers developed in the 17th century as information sheets for merchants. By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspapers. Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. With the popularity of the Internet many newspapers are now digital, with their news presented online rather than in a physical format, with there now being a decline in sales for paper copies of newspapers. Front page of The New York Times on Armistice Day, 1918 Newspapers are typically published daily or weekly. News magazines are also weekly, but they have a magazine format. General-interest newspapers typically publish news articles and feature articles on national and international news as well as local news. The news includes political events and personalities, business and finance, crime, weather, and natural disasters; health and medicine, science, and computers and technology; sports; and entertainment, society, food and cooking, clothing and home fashion, and the arts. Usually, the paper is divided into sections for each of those major groupings. Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing editorials written by an editor and expressing an opinion on a public issue, opinion articles called op-eds written by guest writers, and columns that express the personal opinions of columnists, usually offering analysis and synthesis that attempts to translate the raw data of the news into information telling the reader what it all means and persuading them to concur. Papers also include articles that have no byline; these articles are written by staff writers. A wide variety of material has been published in newspapers. Besides the aforementioned news, information and opinions, they include weather forecasts; criticism and reviews of the arts and of local services such as restaurants; obituaries, birth notices and graduation announcements; entertainment features such as crosswords, horoscopes, editorial cartoons, gag cartoons, and comic strips; advice columns, food, and other columns; and radio and television listings. Newspapers have classified ad sections where people and businesses can buy small advertisements to sell goods or services; as of 2013, an increase in Internet websites for selling goods, such as Craigslist and eBay has led to significantly less classified ad sales for newspapers. Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue. Some newspapers are government-run or at least government-funded; their reliance on advertising revenue and profitability is less critical to their survival. The editorial independence of a newspaper is thus always subject to the interests of someone, whether owners, advertisers or a government. Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record. Many newspapers, besides employing journalists on their own payrolls, also subscribe to news agencies, which employ journalists to find, assemble, and report the news, then sell the content to the various newspapers. This is a way to avoid duplicating the expense of reporting from around the world. Worldwide annual revenue approached $100 billion in 2005-7, then plunged during the worldwide financial crisis of 2008-9.