Photo courtesy of Kay Pat.
Although I haven’t purchased a newspaper in years, I’ll occasionally pick one up when I see it laying on a table somewhere and check it out. Since I only read the good news and skip the bad, it usually takes just a minute or two to make my way from cover to cover.
Lately I’m finding find that I don’t read much of the paper at all because in most cases I have already read the stories online the day before.
By their very nature, unless they put out a special edition to get a jump on a major breaking story, newspapers publish old news. Most of them are only published once a day (during the overnight hours) which means that any news that breaks after the deadline won’t make it into the paper until the next edition is published. This process used to work just fine for the publishers because that’s what the readers expected, but not in today’s Internet world.
Thanks to the net, news stories are now published in real time by a plethora of “new media” sources. Nowadays one can choose between any number of bloggers, online news aggregators and the online divisions of traditional news outlets themselves to get their news within minutes of when the events take place, complete with virtually real-time updates as the events unfold. Those among us who still depend on printed newspapers for their news surely find themselves woefully behind their contemporaries when it comes to staying up on current events.
More than a few folks still take the Sunday paper strictly for the coupons, but even they are beginning to find that those same coupons are available online, free for the taking. All they have to do is print them out on their own computer printer.
Newspapers are getting ever more expensive to print and deliver even as subscriber bases are shrinking. To compensate, they do what any business would do – they raise their prices. Unfortunately for the publishers, that model is unsustainable because few people are willing to pay higher prices for an item that diminishes in real value each and every day. I predict that it won’t be long before the printed newspaper goes the way of the rotary telephone, and in my opinion the world will be a better place for it.