Newspapers Are Dying... As I have written before, from a very early age, I was a big fan of newspapers. But something has changed lately, and it really doesn't bode well for the future of the newspaper industry. When I was young, newspapers were my window on the world. When I grew older, I thought the very height of luxury would be to have a subscription to BOTH the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Somewhere along the way, I realized that each paper had about 500 reporters each working for them, and the thought of having 1,000 people scouring the world looking for information just for me was positively intoxicating! As a matter of fact, for a brief time after I moved to Florida, we had 4 papers delivered to the house every day.... the two local local papers from Tampa and St. Petersburg... plus the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The trouble was that much of these papers were taken up with things that did not personally interest me in the least. But to get at the good stuff I really wanted, I had to wade through a whole lot of things that I didn't want... plus, of course, mountains of ads for things I didn't need and didn't want. I had an early inkling as a kid of what was to happen when my mother
took me on a cruise ship in the late 1950's. Every day, the
Ocean Monarch published the ship's newspaper, really a mimeographed sheet with wire headlines from around the world. Here was a concise, easy to read summary of world events. I was impressed!
I imagined that the President of the United States received something like this in greatly expanded form... today known as the
President's Daily Brief. When I was in service at the Pentagon, I noticed that the Department of Defense published a similar, expanded version of that ship's paper, known as the "
Early Bird", but that publication was not made available to civilians on the outside. Then the Internet came along, particularly with RSS capabilities through Google Reader. Now I could find correspondents that mainly focused on things that I was interested in... plus I found sites like Digg that aggregated interesting postings selected by members from all over the world, which enabled me to learn much more about the world at large and occasionally find an author that I wanted to continue to read on a regular basis... online... for free. What I found was that I was seeing items online about two days before they appeared in print in newspapers. Combine hefty subscription prices (together with a delivery surcharge!), limited personal time, the rise of Craigs List as an online free substitute for classified job ads, and the decision by the St. Petersburg Times to meat ax business coverage, and I found that I wasn't really reading the local paper at all. I haven't missed much. I noticed that newspaper business sections gave inordinate attention to the newspaper industry itself, which I could easily do without, of course. Plus my local paper seemed to reprint stories frequently carried elsewhere. However, I have noticed that I don't know as much about what is going on at the local library and stuff like that, plus I really haven't been paying attention to sports news, particularly with respect to local teams. But I suppose that is a small price to pay. I tried to help the local papers, actually. One paper is owned by a nonprofit foundation, and I emailed them with an offer to help them focus on new media issues. After one courtesy reply, I have heard nothing from them since, even though I've followed up with several interesting reports about the dire condition of the newspaper industry that I found online. I guess they really aren't motivated... or interested. So... I have stopped mentioning newspapers to my students as a vital part of their education, and I have completely stopped reading newspapers myself. Aside from the fact that I don't have dirty hands from all that newsprint ink on my fingers, I really don't think I've suffered at all. Plus I seem to get up-to-the-minute notifications of important events electronically, without having to wait two days to find out in my driveway in the morning. And of course, no more water soaked and entirely missed papers to deal with. I will certainly miss you, newspapers! Reading newspapers will soon become, if it hasn't already, a pastime as quaint as travel by sea. Kids born today will have fond memories of daily newspapers as nostalgic as my own fond childhood memories of an Easter cruise on the Ocean Monarch in the late 1950s. But I really think we are all better off for having moved on. Progress!
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