Newspapers Gain Readership
Category Diversion Management
The 18 to 29 age group is reading more newsprint than last year. Slashdot (and the CNET source) is perpetuating the death-of-print-media, as reported by the Pew Research Center.
Now, as an employee of The Dead Tree Society, I'd just like to offer a note of caution in reading these results. After all, it turns out that while television is continuing to dive at a double-digit rate, newspapers seem to have caught on with the younger crowd. 2008 is up 5 percent from the year before, recapturing it's 2006 numbers. Hm. That's a pretty interesting trend.
The real issue has to do with whether or not newsprint distribution has reached a floor, or just an interruption before it chases after television for least influence. As for the ascendancy of the Internet, as many others are noting, the content is usually from newsprint.
Don't you think that in twenty years, these discussions will look awfully dated as we read about them in our Harry Potter style of newspaper with moving pictures ? I'm expecting convergence as the eventual product, not a bake-off between platforms. Or, maybe, we'll have direct neurological implants and I'll get a full sensory experience.
What would Marshall McLuhan think then about "the medium is the message ?"
The 18 to 29 age group is reading more newsprint than last year. Slashdot (and the CNET source) is perpetuating the death-of-print-media, as reported by the Pew Research Center.
Now, as an employee of The Dead Tree Society, I'd just like to offer a note of caution in reading these results. After all, it turns out that while television is continuing to dive at a double-digit rate, newspapers seem to have caught on with the younger crowd. 2008 is up 5 percent from the year before, recapturing it's 2006 numbers. Hm. That's a pretty interesting trend.
The real issue has to do with whether or not newsprint distribution has reached a floor, or just an interruption before it chases after television for least influence. As for the ascendancy of the Internet, as many others are noting, the content is usually from newsprint.
Don't you think that in twenty years, these discussions will look awfully dated as we read about them in our Harry Potter style of newspaper with moving pictures ? I'm expecting convergence as the eventual product, not a bake-off between platforms. Or, maybe, we'll have direct neurological implants and I'll get a full sensory experience.
What would Marshall McLuhan think then about "the medium is the message ?"
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Comments
It's not so much the delivery vehicle that's a problem. Paper, Kindle, Web, PDFs are just distributions for content. The challenge is making money. Craigslist has almost killed classified, which was the backbone of newspapers. Next up is cars. Well, the automotive industry is in much worse condition than newspapers. Hm, makes me wonder if we'll hear merger talks about a Daimler-Chrysler-Chicago Tribune ? Bad joke.
Back to the subject, on-line content does not generate the same advertising dollars per reader. So, newspapers will consider to rework their platform for their readers. If you get wi-fi access on the plane for reading your newspaper, it's still not the equal to having your nose stuck to the pages of a single newspaper. If I'm reading a newspaper, I'm captive to that one source.
OK, now this comment is drifting into a commentary outside of my expertise, but within my opinion range. Newsprint will survive as long as it's financially feasible to recycle pulp. Newspapers will survive, maybe not flourish, but they will accommodate the algorithms and crowd-sourcing into their own HTML pages. Eventually, I expect news.google.com to be adopted as the design paradigm for most frontpages.
Or, this entire conversation will seem so very quaint in a few years for reasons that we are completely unaware.
Posted by jack dausman At 03:28:44 AM On 12/28/2008 | - Website - |
Posted by Scott Johnsen At 06:21:13 AM On 12/27/2008 | - Website - |