Is Print Media Dying?

The ever eloquent Leonard Pitts has a somewhat bleak column out concerning the future of newspapers and the print media.

I'm talking about reports that, despite all the focus groups we study, all the redesigns we commission, all the shorter stories we write and all the bigger typefaces we employ, newspaper readership is still falling like a boulder from a skyscraper.

It's increasingly difficult to escape a sense that in a video-driven, semi-literate world, people who transmit information via words on paper are uncomfortably akin to those who transmit it via stone tablets. The demoralizing truth is, the folks we purport to serve seem to be saying they can get along just fine without us.

He also expresses some discontent with what he views as the wave of the future. It is a concept that you might call "news on demand" where print media content is driven by readers' online preferences.

Here's how it works: The paper has installed a system whereby every link that is clicked on its website is recorded for the newsroom to see. This gives reporters instant, ongoing feedback on which stories are most interesting to readers. Editors assign follow-ups to those stories and look for more like them. Stories that fail to generate reader interest are killed.

It might be a bit too soon to predict the death of print, and I don't see this trend as being particularly negative. People aren't less interested in news - just the opposite in fact. Consumption of news content is probably at an all time high. What has changed is just the way that people are seeking out this content.

Hard copy newspapers suffer from being stagnant as soon as they are produced. Some of the articles may be popular with the readers, and others may not. But once produced, they are set in stone. Additionally, by the time you can get a copy of a newspaper in your hands, the news it contains is at least twelve hours old, and is already rolling off the bottom of the online news sites.

Television news is fine, but it's delivered to a different audience and it's not able to be filtered by the viewer. If you are watching a news broadcast and you want to know who's going to be starting at quarterback for the Cowboys this week, you'll probably have to sit through national, international and local news before the sports comes around. (This is why most news broadcasts put the full weather forecast near the end.)

Online news can be constantly updated, and the reader can immediately click through to the topics in which they are interested. The concept of harvesting reader preferences when deciding on which stories to run can only be beneficial. I don't believe that people have any desire for the Fourth Estate to make all the decisions about what news is "important" and what we need to know. We want all the news available all the time, with control left in our hands as to what we wish to learn. Ideas like the one Pitts is addressing are probably a very necessary step in keeping the medium viable.

I don't think print newspapers will be going away any time soon. I read multiple news sources online every single day, but I still buy the paper each day also. There is something familiar and comfortable about newspapers, and the fill a need for local news which most online sources lack. But as the technology of news content distribution continues to evolve, they need to change with the times if they want to hang on to their readership.