By Lee Ji-won
You know that classic movie scene, right? The one where the suburban man steps out onto his front porch in his bathrobe, cup of coffee in hand; he bends down to pick up the morning newspaper while giving a friendly wave to his neighbor, who is also doing the same thing.
Now, this image has changed to the man waking up and turning on his laptop, cup of coffee in hand. He then instead settles down into his chair and clicks on a link leading to an online newspaper article.
It is inevitable that significant changes in media will occur as technology continues to advance, but some changes may be too dramatic. Well-known newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are certainly available in print, and people can still be found reading print newspapers.
However, these newspapers are simultaneously conforming to the trend of going digital. Almost all newspapers that are still accessible in print form now have their own websites, offering readers sample articles of current events. They are largely promoting new offers as well, such as the Times Reader, which allows readers to subscribe to the New York Times and download the newspaper onto their computers.
Although digitalizing newspapers seems to just be a part of the technology craze the world is so caught up in, financial matters account for a great portion of this trend.
Large-scale newspapers like the New York Times can afford to offer its readers both print and digitalized versions of its papers. Therefore, such companies still keep traditional newspapers alive and prevent them from diminishing, while also appealing to tech-savvy readers. However, smaller publications cannot afford to keep printing papers and manage a digital version at the same time due to financial restrictions. These constraints prevent smaller setups from hiring more workers, and because less people are reading print newspapers, these companies have no option but to go completely online.
Take for example the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. About a year ago, the 150-year old newspaper, better known as the Seattle P-I, revealed that it will be printing its final edition and going entirely digital. The Seattle P-I had been financially troubled for a while, but even after moving its operation online, the staff was reduced to a mere 20 people, nothing in comparison to the 165-person operation it once used to be. Now, the new SeattlePI.com acts more like a news aggregator, providing links to other sites.
If other publications in the same grim situation as the Seattle P-I make the same decision to eliminate their printed newspapers, the death of print seems far too imminent. Vin Crosbie, a managing partner of Digital Deliverance LLC and publisher of “Digital Deliverance” newsletter, advises global news media about different media strategies and tactics.
He predicts in an essay backed up by numbers that “more than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of the next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies _ namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal _ will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print.” Crosbie also recently predicted that “the newspaper industry had five to ten years to undergo radical change or face the chopping block.”
If all goes according to Crosbie’s predictions, what can decelerate the speed at which print newspapers are dying? Shorter stories? More photographs? Or will print newspapers even survive, and for how long? As technology advances and the world chases after the progresses being made in that field, the death of print is unpredictable.
Lee Ji-won is 10th grade at St. Marks School in Southborough, Massachusetts, the U.S. She can be reached at docleeym@gmail.com