Home > History Group > Discussion Board

With the advent of the Internet and its social and news websites, is the newspaper is becoming extinct?

No. The newspaper is not becoming extinct. However, it is like a living organism facing radical change in its environmental niche: it is under extreme pressure, and must adapt rapidly. Certainly, numerous individual newspapers will die, and quickly. They are the newspapers (organisms) that are ill-suited for rapid change, and/or that hold to strategies that are proving unsuitable. The newspapers that survive will, broadly speaking, do several things. First, they will identify which things are done best by a physical paper and which through electronic media. Second, they will do them. Third, they will build alliances with Internet resources, becoming hybrid publications.

I think they will exist if, and only if, advertisers think that they are a great place to spend their money.  The cost of the paper will never subsidize the total cost of publishing the paper.  If the Internet becomes a more efficient place to advertise, I think the papers might become extinct.  I hope they do not, because I prefer the experience of holding a paper and being able to take it wherever I go.

Undoubtedly, Internet is being used increasingly to delivering news and interesting information on many interesting social topics of current interest.  This is because of the many advantages of delivering information of this type on the internet. For example:

1. Availability of most updated information round the clock.
2. Ability of reader to customize and choose the type of information they like to have from a very vast reservoir if information. This includes current as well as old information. Even the way the information is presented can be customized. Reader can conveniently refer to additional information related to a news item using suitable links to other pages on the same site and to other sites.
3. Facility to alert individuals through e-mail, cell phones or other devices, availability of any new item of their interest available on a particular site.
4. Readers can easily forward interesting news items to others. This enables people to remain in touch with others easily.
5. Ability to present information in rich formats including videos.
6. Instant availability of information for use round the globe without additional variable costs.
7. Ability of content providers to get detailed data on popularity of information put on the Internet. This information can help in better choice of information put on their sites.
8. Very short lead time between occurrence of an event and news making on its availability on the Internet.

The growing popularity of Internet over the print media can also be judged from the fact that most big publishers of newspapers and magazines have also set up sites on the Internet to supplement their print media products. However, there are other areas where newspapers score over the Internet-news. The main advantages of newspapers are:

1. Printed material is more convenient to read. One can easily relax, reclined over a deck chair, and reading a newspaper. This Kind of ease in reading is not possible with Internet-news
2. Printed material  can be carried and read at any location of the world. There is no precondition of availability of Internet connectivity.
3. Reading printed informationdoes not require any equipment such as a computer

However, it is important to note that Internet capabilities are improving very fast, and with that the Internet-news is moving toward overcoming its current disadvantages over newspaper. It is also increasing the margin of advantages where it scores over newspaper.

Thus it will not be wrong to assume that at some time in future, Internet will replace newspapers, magazines, and journals for all practical purposes. But this time is not likely to come in as much short time as some people expect – I believe it will take decades, rather than years, for this to happen.

I certainly hope not!  I, for one, enjoy reading the paper on the weekends over my morning coffee.  I enjoy clipping coupons and reading the book reviews.  It's fun for my kids to read the funnies and to help me decide what to do and where to go in our area when events crop up...especially those small town crafts and festivals that are all over during spring and summer breaks.  They are a great read, but they are also useful for so many other things:

I remember using old newspapers to make patterns for doll clothes and later, big people clothes with my grandmother and mother.  We used the paper for paper mache, for building boats to float on the pond, for making hats to march around the house in, and for packing items when we moved.  My grandmother read the paper religiously every day and then lined her bird cage with it.

What a tragedy if they all by the wayside.  An entire generation or two will be disappointed, and the newer generations will never know what they missed!

This was just an issue being discussed on the Colbert Report the other night.

I think newspapers are in trouble, unfortunately.  I will be honest - I do not read the actual paper on a regular basis.  I enjoy reading the "fun" parts of the Sunday paper, but for news stories, weather, etc. I go to a web site.  I check the web site for our local paper almost daily, to see if there are any updates in the discussions about school budgets next year.  But if I can do that for free from my computer, why would I pay a subscription fee?

Today's younger generation is web-savvy.  When you have access to worldwide papers online at the click of a button, why subscribe to only one?  I will admit, there are certain features that are usually only available in print (such as the comics, the regular classifieds, etc.).  However, the "hard-hitting news stories" are generally published online and therefore available for free and without waiting for delivery of the paper. 

If newspapers want to survive, they will have to learn how to compete with the variety and speed of information available online.

I would hate to see traditional newspapers become completely extinct, if only for the treasured experience of reading every single section of a Sunday newspaper, then doing the giant crossword puzzle by hand in ink.

Nevertheless, I do fear that print newspapers will be largely phased out over time. The ease of finding information on the internet and the ubiquity of personal computers has forced print journalism into massive change, much of which has been reactionary on the part of the newspaper industry.

Timbrady is correct that newspapers will suvive if advertisers support them. Everything in the business world comes down to dollars and cents.

In response to 5 a would like to say this:

I understand this feeling of loss we have when things that are familiar to us, and things we like change. But that is the way life is. We miss today the kind of life we had yesterday; and tomorrow we will miss what we have today.

My only hope is that Internet will create its own little joys.

krishna-agrawala (post 8) is absolutely correct--"tomorrow we will miss what we have today."

I used to be one of those people who resisted any kind of technological advances. It took me forever to break down and get cable TV, and I was the last of my friends to install an answering machine in my house. I was a daily newspaper subscriber and loved sitting down in the morning with my coffee to look over the daily paper.

15 years later, I have evolved to the point where I have a BlackBerry, no land line, and my newspaper subscription is only for the Sunday paper. I read my news online, but I love to sit down on Sunday with a Bloody Mary and peruse the big Sunday paper at my leisure. I open it up, put the sections in the order I want to read them, pull out the advertisements and save only the coupon sections so I can clip them later, and set in for my Sunday read. I save the comics for last, and I finish up by doing the giant crossword.

I don't miss the daily newspaper, because I am able to get that online. I really enjoy booting up my laptop in the mornings and opening my tab that starts my day. This activity has replaced my hard copy morning newspaper. I still have a cup of coffee with it, though.

In reply to #1:  This is a great question.  I think the newspaper is going to have to undergo really radical change in order to meet the needs of the next generation of news consumers.  Even putting aside the 24/7 news cycle that has become the norm, the reality today is that those under 35 or 40 are increasingly likely to obtain their news from an Internet source, and blogs are only part of the spectrum from which to choose.  Social networking, for example, is having a tremendous effect on how consumers receive information and, more importantly, how they interact with their information and with others receiving that same information.  They want collaboration, sharing, interaction - not a one on one, feed me the news model.  And, with twitter becoming so incredibly popular as a serious means of transmitting news as it happens, it becomes hard to imagine how newspapers, as they are presently structured, can hope to keep up.  If they want to keep up, they need to go to a more in depth, scholarly approach that is often missing in the rapid world of the Internet.