Wikipedia’s free access is destroying the subscriber base of the sources it copies

Evidence

But to tamp down the effulgent nonsense that emanates from those drawn to this narcissistic flame, Wikipedia then tries to banish all originality, insisting that everything be traced back to a “conventional” legitimate source, like encyclopedias, newspapers, or professional journals. This has been an inspired stipulation, since by construction everything that is legitimate on Wikipedia comes from somewhere else where someone else actually had to invest valuable time and resources into researching and vetting the results; Wikipedia gets it for free. The Wiki-workers who manage to extract or cut and paste this information in an era of ever-tightening intellectual property are themselves anonymous and slippery, so they can never be reined in or punished for their expropriations. The dynamic becomes more pyrrhic when one observes that the ease of access to Wikipedia has begun to destroy the subscriber base of those very same encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2104

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is the claim that Wikipedia cannibalized encyclopedia and newspaper subscriptions empirically supported, or is it mainly a rhetorical flourish? Worth checking the data on print media decline causality.