The END of Media as we KNOW it?
Posted by Ron Sitton on November 7th, 2008MONTICELLO, Ark. — I recently attended the Associated Collegiate Press/College Media Advisers annual conference in Kansas City, Mo. Students seemed worried that the media as we know it will not be there once they get out of school.
Who’s to blame them considering the continual death tolls:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.html
Considering we’ve just gone from three national daily newspapers to two, who’s to provide the news if the profits from the print product disappear? Who’s to say the Christian Science Monitor won’t figure it out?
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1029/p25s01-usgn.html
But just when everyone says newspapers are dying, along comes a historical event and EVERYBODY wants a paper:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/06/obama.newspapers.ap/index.html
Personally I believe newspapers will stay around as long as smaller communities exist, and as long as people need something to read while taking public transportation, going to the bathroom or sitting under a tree. Truly, time will tell.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
There’s that “belief” word again….
I stick by my prediction from the year 2000, based on some evidence, that the last year for most paper editions to be tossed on porches will be 2019. I’ve already bet a sixpack of Yuengling on it. Or was that Bass Ale?
That’s not to say there won’t be a few. Most major newspaper companies are figuring out the Web more every day. With hand-held digital devices, why would you need the print edition?
I haven’t stained my fingers with newsprint ink on a daily basis since 1994. Haven’t missed it for one second. But that’s me, and millions of others like me.
There are still a few hundred thousand in this country who like ink and paper and are willing to pay a few cents for it. The can have it…
I guess I can see the value to some people of having a copy of the Obama edition due to the history. It may be one of the last newspaper front pages people save in this way.
You better wrap them in plastic. It will be a valuable oddity in 50 or 100 years for sure.
Where’s the evidence for this? I put together a whole bunch of factors in 2000, but I don’t remember them all off the top of my head.
But here’s a few hints:
The forestry economy will not be sustainable at current levels for more than about seven generations of these pine plantations. Much evidence for this in Europe.
Also consider the cost and toxicity of the ink industry itself in the face of the coming Green Revolution.
Then there’s the growing number of people who get news and information digitally vs. in print. Chart the trend line. Can’t see much past 2019. It might level off down in some places awhile longer.
But all in all, face facts.
The people who read print are a dying bread.
The good news for newspapers is they are living longer : )
The bad news is, they are getting more and more broke, thanks to Bush, who many of these newspapers endorsed!
November 26th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
In my opinion, newspapers will always exist, but will maintain a much smaller share of the market than in the past. As a result of this transition, which is, basically, newspapers finding its niche in a much larger, more advanced world of media, alarmist hail it as the end of newspapers as we know it.
However, since it’s sexy to fantasize about doomsday scenarios, here’s mine: The very top and the very bottom persist–and the in-between dies. The top survives strictly because of the brand and the latter strictly because there’s nowhere else to get community news.
In other words, The New York Times and the Advance Monticellonian will survive, but the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the Des Moines Register not so much.