Will it be better? Worse? Much the same? Will it increase “echo chamber-ism” on the part of news consumers, or is it way too late for that? How will it affect the amount of “professionally created” news out there, and is that even relevant? What other questions are there?
I think the main casualty will be reporting on local issues. Big papers do fine reporting on national and global issues, and with their smaller competition dead I assume they’ll have even more money to pay reporters and generate good reporting.
But they don’t keep tabs on local schools and police, State legislatures or town mayors or whatever. I suspect reporting on these will suffer as the smaller regional papers die out.
In the U.K. news papers are a big thing to read, for going to, and having breaks at work.
Also unlike t.v. you get more “Bang per Buck”, from papers, if I’m interested in the elections say, in Chile I will get a more in depth, and longer report from a paper then from the short soundbite on t.v. news.
I suspect that the U.S.C.s A.S.C. made this report for some sort of agenda of their own.
Headline grabbing, and notoriety spring to mind.
(I’ve also noticed that if a spectacular event does happen and t.v. news extends its coverage,then much of the air time will be redundant, reshowing the same stuff over and over, idle speculation, and pointless verbiage so that there’ sno "dead air"time.)
I find the summary in the link to be full of the sort of predictions one heard in 1997 about the imminent death of stores due to online shopping.
This one especially caught my eye (bolding mine): “Over the next three years, according to Cole, the tablet will become the primary tool for personal computing. Use of a desktop PC will dwindle to only 4-6 percent of computer users.”
:dubious:
Reading further…
" ‘We are seeing only the beginning of the shift in American purchasing habits brought by the Internet,” Cole said. “Five years from now, the traditional retail landscape will be completely different than it is today.’ "
" ‘In 2006, YouTube and Twitter had just been born, and Facebook was a toddler,’ said Cole. ‘A half-decade ago, who would have thought that these nascent technologies would become the standard for social communication in 2011?’ "
I’m pretty sure that plain old-fashioned talking is still the overwhelming global standard for social communication, and will be for quite some time.
Newspapers aren’t dying because TV news is taking their place. They’re dying because the Internet is eviscerating their business model. Craigslist and eBay killed the classifieds. Google and a few other companies dominate online advertising. The papers can try to make people pay for online access, but unless they’re already huge (NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.), that tends to just send them into a downward spiral as they lose readers and relevance.
I read quite a lot. 30 years ago, I’d probably have been one of those people who subscribes to several newspapers. But I’ve never subscribed to a newspaper in my life. I can get far more in-depth information from a wide variety of online news sites than I can from any reasonable combination of newspapers, and I can get it for free and without being a day behind the news.
I expect to see more newspapers follow the NY Times lead and gate most of their content behind a paywall. At some point, it will become a better value proposition to pay for news online than to just read the free sites, but I don’t think it’s there yet.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer has done a far superior job investigating and reporting local news and scandals than any online entity could have done. I’m happy to subscribe. Sadly, the paper has gotten smaller in recent years.
I’ve seen quite a few laptops used by train commuters in the U.K. replacing N.P.s on homeward journeys, but going to work, and especially on the Tube , N.P.s are still favourite.
Also on work breaks, people read papers, not go on the net.
A great deal of the revenue for Papers is advertising, but as long as people keep printing them; then people will keep buying them.
I think that reports of the death of the N.P. have been greatly exaggerated.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Haaaa haa ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, thank you, I haven’t had a good laugh like that in ages.
Maybe you’re not in the states. I defy you to find a single large newspaper in the U.S. that has enough money now to pay reporters and generate good reporting.
It’s the local papers that are doing a little better than the larger ones, precisely because of the ability to print local interest news (high school sports, for example). For the rest, go read iamthewalrus(:3='s post again. Referred to for truth.
Newspapers on paper will only finally die when a better, equally portable, easily available medium comes along, presumably electronic but not tablets or laptops (see the movie Minority Report for at least an interesting possibility). But they will keep sinking and hanging on by their fingernails until then. And by the time that medium comes along, it won’t be newspaper companies populating it, it will be too late for them by then.
Roddy
How old are the people you work with? My parents’ generation reads newspapers, but very few people 30 and younger do. If I or most of my coworkers were sitting around with nothing to do at work, we’d read something on our phones.
There are plenty of people who still read newspapers, but they are heavily weighted in older demographics. Take a look at the circulation stats for UK papers. There’s a pretty clear trend there. And it’s going to accelerate as the newspaper reading population ages. And the newspaper companies start having serious financial problems long before their circulation numbers drop to zero.
How much of the stuff you read online is generated by newspapers, though? If you go to The Drudge Report or DailyKos, 70% of the stories they summarize and link to are generated by newspapers.
I’ve seen a lot of blogs that have been cheering the death of the newspaper industry, but where are they going to get their content when the newspapers are gone?
A decent amount of it. I’d guess about a third to half of what I read online is either published by a newspaper website or links to and discusses a newspaper article.
However, as the years have gone by, the fraction that is newspaper-originated has dropped, while magazines and various blogs and online publications have grown. I haven’t noticed a quality drop-off (though that may be happening and I haven’t noticed it, or it may happen in the future).
I’m not cheering the death of the industry. I think newspapers serve a useful purpose, and I hope they figure out how to make money as news-publishing organizations that aren’t reliant on printing things on paper and selling that paper.
But news can’t be copyrighted in and of itself (only in how it’s presented), so there’s no reason a free site won’t repackage it. Heck, they don’t even necessarily have to do the repackaging themselves, just using user generated content. Heck, I get a lot of my news from people posting something they want me to read.
When information is free, I don’t think news is just that lucrative a business to be in. You need opinion and entertainment. The television-based news organizations are in a much better position to handle this.
Here’s my cite that newspaper readership is concentrated in older people. Scroll down near the bottom, under demographics. About 25% of people 18-34 read newspapers, compared to over 60% of 65 and older people. Readership is dropping in all categories, but it’s lowest among the young.
Sure. But fewer and fewer each year. And more and more of them are old people.
The Chicago Tribune. They’re constantly running exposes of malfeasance in state and local government, from clout in state university admissions to union boss pension grabs to mobbed-up felons in suburban governments. They’ve also done a lot of good non-political stuff like exposes of nursing home conditions, and a couple of years ago they won a Pulitzer Prize for investigating lax supervision of dangerous baby products.
The traditional retail landscape IS different (although not neatly in five years from that editorial). Major bookstore chains are drying up. Music retailers are a rarity. Think about all the shopping centers that had both in 1990, and how many now have neither.
The last time I was in the States, last summer, I stopped in on five malls that had been thriving when I left three years earlier. One (Owings Mills Center near Baltimore) was moribund, with maybe 80% of the stores boarded up. Another, White Flint in Rockville MD, was in better shape–about 60% operational. Ballston Commons (in Arlington, VA) was limping along with maybe 90% occupancy, but some of the adjunct buildings and restaurants had been bulldozed in my absence; Landmark Center in Alexandria had made Chris Rock’s transition from “the mall white people go to” to “the mall white people USED to go to.” Tyson’s Corner in McLean was still doing good business.
Not sure it can all be laid at internet commerce’s feet, but that’s certainly a changed retail landscape in my book. And zombie malls and failed retailers take a huge bite out of newspaper ad revenue.
As a programmer of the robotic inserters that put newspapers together, I can tell you that newspaper publishers are freeking out. It isn’t as if I am in the boardrooms or anything like that, but the frontline personnel are frightened for their jobs.
This a sea change. A genuinely different means of disseminating news has affected the intake of money to such a point that all print media needs to reevaluate their business models.
This will take some time, since these establishments are rather entrenched.
They saw their profits dwindle when targeted marketing captured a huge percentage of their classifieds, so they responded with their own (expensive) targeting. But the return on investment hasn’t been enough to deal with their dwindling readership.
In some markets, Chicago Tribune is a good example, they will still be extant.
But in many locales, by 2020, they will be extinct.
There aren’t enough eyeroll emoticons. You think the number of people reading newspapers over the last eleven years has declined that precipitously because young people aren’t as literate? In 1999, young people’s literacy was sufficient for 45% of people to be newspaper readers, and by 2010, it’s down to 25%? And a similar (if not quite as dramatic) drop for other age groups? That’s absolute nonsense. You couldn’t get a literacy drop like that with anything short of the complete eradication of all elementary schools in the country.
This is a massive demographic change driven by the poor economic position of newspapers relative to other information sources, most notably the internet.
Uh, it takes one to know one? Might want to take another look at that data that you casually dismissed.
The problem is, as has been said before, where is the internet getting the news in the first place, if not from newspaper reporters? If they go away are we going to have to rely on unpaid bloggers? That sounds like a recipe for ignorance if I ever heard one.