Seth Godin asked the question:
Years and years after some pundits began predicting the end of newspapers, the newspapers themselves are finally realizing that it’s over. Huge debt, high costs, declining subscription rates, plummeting ad base–will the last one out please turn off the lights.
On their way out, though, we’re hearing a lot of, “you’ll miss us when we’re gone…” laments. I got to thinking about this. It’s never good to watch people lose their livelihoods or have to move on to something new, even if it might be better. I respect and honor the hard work that so many people have put into newspapers along the way. If we make a list of newspaper attributes and features, which ones would you miss?
I must admit, I rarely read newspapers, or magazines. Well, I do – just not the printed version. For my NZ fix, I read nzherald.co.nz (especially the mobile version) and stuff.co.nz on a daily basis, and for the UK, the guardian, as well as google news, which is an aggregation of a lot of news sources.
But I almost never buy a paper.
The only time I DO buy a paper is on a weekend, if I specifically want to read the magazine sections, maybe twice a year. That’s it. I can skim the headlines online (and read what I want) in less time than it takes me to navigate the front page. Their coverage of topics I care about are either minimal, or so badly written that there isn’t any point.
And to be honest, there is so much damn information coming at me, there is nothing NEW in a morning paper by the time it shows up. Opinion – said magazine section – is about it. And to be honest, that’s really just a printed, once-a-week blog! Oh, and if I miss the paper today – no big deal. I can find out from the 10 other sources of the same information (TV, Radio, online etc), or just not bother to know. If it’s that important, someone else I know will have seen it.
Like Seth, I agree that it’s crap that people will lose their livelihoods (not so bad if they move to something else). I knew a few people in the words game (Hi Juha, Hi Rachel), but from a purely selfish stand point, the loss of the printed word isn’t going to effect me much.
I wonder if there is a niche for some kind of umbrella service – we assemble a “paper” from various bloggers (well, jurno’s really, but we call them bloggers at the moment), and split the ad revenue. The content is based on the categories that the user has said they care about (topic), in the areas they care about (location). It’s delivered via RSS or via PDF – so you can offline it on a Kindle or similar, or (GASP!) print it out.
But then we’d have google news or EPIC:
Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. — Wikipedia.
