http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/davidho...ives/163713.asp

The Seattle PI is about to go out of business. Seattle has been unusually in having two major daily newspapers in a city of this size. No more. And the Seattle Times is bleeding cash too.

Newspapers have been the main source of local news for a couple centuries now. TV and radio news almost always just re-report what the newspaper reporters have written.

But the business model has collapsed. For many years it has actually been the classified ads that kept the local dailies in the black, and now that's all migrated to the internet. Many newspapers have adapted to web just fine for content-delivery, but they never managed to figure out how to make it pay the bills.

And now we don't need our local newspapers to read the wire service stories. We can read the feeds directly. But ... it is the local newspapers that GENERATE those wires service stories, too. Without all the local papers, where will the wire service news come from?

It seems ironic that the same information revolution that now allows me to read instantaneous news reports from all over the world is also threatening my access to news in my own local area.

 

As print media goes away so will the permanent written record.
so much of the electronic media is on someone's server for as long as they feel it convenient to maintain it.
Historians may look back on the coming years as the dark ages since it will all be lost to time if society isn't careful.

 

Yes, the archive issue is a concern. Especially since people no longer write and collect letters and journals, which are huge sources of the historical record.

 

My home town newspaper is teetering too. I agree on future prospects.

 

Even with the information on line, I still read the local newspaper everyday.

 

I don't.

I'm not pretending that I know how this is going to turn out. There is a market for the news, that's always been clear. The question is how to translate that market into a payment mechanism.

And newspapers face the same problem that has existed ever since radio and TV adopted the free-with-advertising model -- it's damn hard for someone to compete with "free".

My college newspaper was very profitible when I was there, 20 years ago. We gave the paper away for free, but ads targeted at the MIT population were valuable to a lot of advertisers. They were also the very first paper to publish on the web, and had one of the first 100 websites of any kind.

I think they have more money concerns now than they did when I worked there.

 

We don't take the Sunday paper any longer. I still read the paper at work during lunch, but that is donated to the school.

 

This was a topic on Mike/Mike in the Morning, and ESPN radio/TV show. It started with Mike Greenberg talking about how he looks forward to breaking out the Sunday morning paper with his coffee.

Greenberg was reading a news article that expected 10 MAJOR newspapers in major metropolitan areas to collapse by the end of the year. I'm not a fan of traditional print, but I'm also not a fan of reading everything on line. I guess my style of reading a blurb here and there supports the web model.

I found the article they must have referenced:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009030...08599188378500

 

One reprieve the newspaper has compared to online is the ability to be 'unplugged' and still work fine in the 'private reading library'.
I did notice that the new kindle offers a newsprint subscription so maybe even that advantage is going by the wayside as well.

 

Just think of all the trees we'll be saving!!!

Mike mentioned it in his first post--the business model is no longer sound. Instead of a hard record or even microfiche, you now have the world wide web. My silly rants will be around for as long as S2Ki is viable.

With the advent of camera phones, I think you may eventually see "eyewitness journalism", as is happening a bit in Japan.

My friend participated in a "web dive" put on by MSN in Fiji a couple of years back. They had a live camera on the dive, and people watching on the web would ask questions about what they saw.

This doesn't do much for analysis, but I'm not that excited about the analysis most newspapers provide anyway.