Debate (newspapers are things of the past) (1)

ARE NEWSPAPERS THE THINGS OF THE PAST???

With the development of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) and more generally the Internet people have come to no longer simply consume media in a linear fashion, they take a more fragmented approach. In news consumption people no longer want to simply have one newspaper with a vast array of topics inside. They want to pick and choose which stories and columns they consume, people now prefer to pull the content they want rather than have it pushed on them. In a digital world the news consumer can become their own editor and no longer need to rely entirely on old hierarchical structures.

In an interconnected global world whereby technology allows us within seconds to communicate across the globe in a variety of forms the newspaper medium becomes obsolete. In the time it takes to write, edit, print and distribute a newspaper the events being covered may very well have changed, when we have the technology to overcome this problem it seems unlikely that newspapers will continue to exist because who wants to read old news? An example of newspapers not being able to adapt to changing events can be seen with the killing of Osama Bin Laden on 2nd May 2011, the story broke too late for the morning newspapers in the UK to be able to change their pages to include the story, it was then subsequently reported a day late on the 3rd May. Newspapers have no place in the modern media landscape as they are not environmentally friendly, they are a waste of paper when there are many other my efficient ways in which news can be disseminated. For example a single annual subscription to the New York Times roughly generates 520lb of waste which equates to approximately 4.25 trees being cut down per reader per year 2, when you take into account all the other publications that printed throughout the world this equates to a lot of wastage of increasingly scarce natural resources which could be avoided. Using digital tools to distribute news is more efficient as you only use resources when the content is actually required rather than the print media method in which the product is printed when it may not be necessarily purchased and consumed.

In the internet age, Newspapers are no longer financially profitable businesses.

They are struggling to encourage investment and to survive in the long-term.

Revenue is falling across the three main streams available to newspapers: sales, advertising and subscriptions. Sales and subscriptions are dropping as consumers move to the internet for information (often the website of the newspaper themselves!)1 Advertising is not as profitable either, as increasingly advertisers look to pop-up systems on websites and buying space on search engines. Many newspapers have resorted to cutting costs (firing staff, reducing the length of the paper) and raising prices. Yet it does not seem likely that people will be willing to pay more for less.