Over the weekend, I caught the latest issue of Time on our kitchen table. The headline read "How to Save Your Newspaper: A Modest Proposal". Now, unlike, Jonathan Swift's so-called 'modest proposal', Walter Isaacson's ideas weren't satirical and made some sense.
In case you choose not to read it, I'll sum it up briefly.
The issue with many newspapers today is not that less people are reading the papers. In fact, the amount of readers has grown substantially over the past few years. What is dwindling is the amount of people PAYING to read articles. Think about it. How much easier is it to go the NY Times online or Sac Bee online instead of going out and buying the newspaper? Sometimes, it's nice to go out and buy the paper, but in an envrionmentally friendly age, buying a print issue seems like a "waste of paper".
Isaacson says the solution is for papers to start charging for their news. The Wall Street Journal does this, why not other papers? Now, that's not to say that papers should start charging outrageous fees, but paying online for a subscription is the same as paying for a subscription in print. It's either paying that small fee, or being overwhelmed with heavy amounts of advertisement which is something most newspapers try to avoid (but obviously it is still important).
That's a basic summary of the article, which in itself isn't very long so I would suggest go reading it and getting an idea about the situation of the print journalism world (especially if you're seriously considering pursuing journalism, I think it's good to know).
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I think the evolution of "news" is fascinating and will remain so. But the theory of evolution fits, I just have no idea what the survivors will look like.
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