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4 July, 2008
Where Next For Newspapers?
By Neil Dodds 16 March, 2007 "Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling." - The conclusion to Robert Kuttner's long and fascinating column in the Columbia Journalism Review on the future of the printed press.Kuttner approaches declining circulations and rising internet readerships (and revenues) from the point of view of a young blogger, who reads not only the four newspapers Kuttner reads in the morning, but also 200-odd RSS feeds and numerous other blogs.
It appears the younger generation are getting a more diverse media experience. The traditional mainstream media response to findings like this has been to argue that diverse doesn't always mean rounded, never mind authoritative: But Kuttner finds this isn't always the case, and larger as well as smaller newspapers are using techniques from the web to reach out to new readers.
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