Futurist Ross Dawson has published a timeline for the demise of newspapers around the world.
Interestingly, he thinks that newspapers will die out in the US first, in the year 2017, followed by the UK two years later. He supports his reasoning by pointing to a number of contributing factors and they are difficult to argue with - increasingly cheap and efficient digital platforms, ad dollars migrating from print to digital, rising print production costs and good ole' demographics.
Predictions like these raise alarms at newspapers, I'm sure, but I don't think all is lost. An evolution away from print for newspapers is inevitable. Newsprint is just too inefficient when compared to digital platforms. Newsprint is expensive, resource heavy, and fixed in time. Digital platforms - even e-ink readers which haven't arrived on the scene in sufficient numbers yet, offer instant updating and a near limitless page count (a print concept, but you know what I mean). Why wouldn't news media move in that direction?
I'm not ready to totally accept his prediction, however. While most print versions of newspapers are likely to diminish in frequency or disappear altogether in the next decade, the notion that not a single newspaper will remain is hard to swallow. The one-time Sunday paper Panorama, created by the folk at McSweeney's demonstrates one avenue to keep print alive - the creation of single edition papers featuring long-form journalism and compelling graphics covering an important issue (say a special election print issue).
But Dawson does point to a couple of factors that bear considering:
1) as print use declines, the cost of print rises, making it an even more expensive proposition to keep print editions alive
2) demographic changes are a strong current to fight against.
Me? I'm not fretting quite as much as I used to about the death of print. News organizations are critically important to a democracy and they won't go away. They'll evolve, a transformation we're already witnessing as traditional newspapers develop digital news platforms (I have a number of great news apps on my iPad). Print will become a niche product servicing a niche market - just one of numerous vehicles for delivering and receiving news.
What do you think?
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