The News Business: Out of Print

The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news:

Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts
that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s
doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these
parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the
$450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what
Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and
cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under
glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet,
which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for
American readers. For young people, and for the most politically
engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had
become the least preferred source for news among younger people.
According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie
Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of
thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in
the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would
rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that
when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently
ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that
originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any
newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

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Dennis G. Jerz

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