Newspapers, in the ever-expanding universe of instant information on the Internet, are so retro.
Michael S. Malone has an interesting commentary on ABC News this week. Malone's commentary reflects on how his life-long habit of reading newspapers religiously changed around the time of the dot.com bust in the Silicon Valley.
If you think about it, newspapers, despite all the arguments to the contrary, are a bit of a throwback. With the growth of the Internet, blogging, and access to top-notch scholarly electronic journals online, the idea of sipping coffee on the backporch while doing the New York Times crossword is nostalgic.
Like many of us, Malone is a true newspaper person:
I was a true newspaper person: I loved reading them, I taught them in school, I regularly wrote for them, and always assumed that some day, after the TV and magazine stuff was over, I'd go back to them.
But then something happened. For Malone it was a combination of factors: lack of time, lack of quality, deceptive advertising practices, change in priorities, etc... But most of all, and I feel the same way about this, he didn't need newspapers in his life to know what was going on in the world. He could find the same information (and more of it) elsewhere. He could also find it faster than waiting for the newspaper to arrive.
Throughout the day, I construct my own newspaper in cyberspace, a real-time assemblage of wire service stories, newspaper features, blogs, bulletin boards, columns, etc. I suspect most of you do, too.
Well, there you have it. Print newspapers are going the way of the 8-Track tapes or floppy disks. At the same time, people still insist that they will always be around. Why?
Malone sums it up nicely:
In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades — only to then double or triple that rate of decline — would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let's finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.
Now Malone's confession comes from a true newspaper guy and I trust him. The message is sad but true.
PBTaxpayer has a good follow up on Malone's commentary.
Newspapers are on a slow death as spelled out rather well in Dan Gilmor's book "We The Media" as well in Phil Meyer's Book "Vanishing Newspaper". The issue is can the newspapers morph them selves into, at a minimum, an online equivilant. The answer is clearly no as the lines of profitability and quality product never cross (Lawyers, accountants and insurance companies - Oh my).