I believe print newspapers will be drawn back into the past. In the short term print newspapers will cut editions down to one or two a week with tons of calendars, obits, chicken dinners, school news, etc. Then all “regular” news will be online.
Papers will be printed at central plants. and staffs in non-edit and ad departments will virtually disappear, as will big plants. The web, TV and radio will deliver most news, and perhaps the diminshed publications, like some TV news now, will become shamelessly attached to causes, political parties or philosophies. In other words, print will return to what it was in pre-civil war times.
In the immediate future, there will be cuts in publication days, combinations, bankruptcies, etc. I believe “newspapers” as we know them will become obsolete.
At first I thought there would be a slow decline. Now the figures show there will be a collapse. The dam is cracking wide open now. Latest figures show 10 to 20 percent ad losses this year compared to the same figures last year for metros.
Compound those figures for the past three years and try to come to a different conclusion. The flood will begin to sweep most metro print away in the next few years and smaller papers in the next five.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
hence my urgency at finding a job not tied to the newspaper biz, at least peripherally (software vendor). it amazes me that we're still selling a lot of licenses, at least outside the US. the growth is in developing economies where literacy is rising quickly yet most people don't have the money for a computer + internet service. but in the US and much of Europe, the newspaper is as dead as the trees felled to produce the paper.
Posted by: forty2 on June 23, 2008 9:57 PMWithout meaning to romanticize the past, it seems to me that there's a lot to said for that unabashed taking of points of view that was, if books tell truth, the norm during the heyday of the newspaper. In the time when Liebling could happily anticipate finding a dozen local newspapers on his doorstep, one (at least) was openly communist, others nearly openly fascist, leaving an enormous middle ground in which discussion was legitimate.
As ownership of media outlets became consolidated, what I call the ClearChannel effect took over: everything coming from Big Media — what we're no longer calling Mainstream Media because, dammit, we're the real main stream — was homogenized to the point that it all advertised the same products, played the same music, and supported the same political views.
It seems to me the critical issue is that the newspapers and the TV news have so obviously become propaganda arms of Big Brother Business and his sidekick Government.
This is what a statist wants: central control over what you hear as alternatives. Democracy in the flesh is inherently anti-statist. Herein lies conflict.
The internet provides us with the ability to exchange information rapidly and without interference from editors or advertisers. This means a lot of BS circulates, but so does a lot of truth.
Thus the need for those currently in power to seize control of the net. Thus the DMCA, and to some extent the governmental interest in removing child porn from the net (a worthy goal that would be close to accomplishment if existing laws were enforced).
Posted by: Chuck Dupree on June 23, 2008 11:08 PM