With the all but inevitable death of the newspaper as we know it, should we be alarmed? As journalists? As consumers? I offer a resounding "no."
There seems to always be a cry for the permanence of established media when a specific industry seems doomed for annihilation. When the audio tape was invented, and tape recorders became a household object, the radio industry feared that it was doomed. Why would people keep listening to the radio when they can record our music? The same dilemma was addressed with the television industry upon the advent of the VCR. All they have to do is record our shows and watch them later! They can even fast forward through the commercials!
The media industries that have survived and even flourished in the face of such threatening innovation are those that recognize, modify, and adapt their business model. True, newspapers will not survive for another ten, five, or even two years based on their current organization. But, the few will recognize how to change, and the rest will soon follow. iTunes, YouTube, online newspapers, Drudge Report, etc. all saw that technology opened a new opportunity, so they seized it, and they are surviving. The newspaper will change--it has to. We just shouldn't be so afraid of the unknown.
3 comments:
Most certainly jobs will be lost in the transition. For traditional labor workers during the industrial revolution, life wasn't so great. Society as a whole, however, benefited when their trade became obsolete. Thank goodness for survival of the fittest and evolution in a free market economy.
I agree completely that as a consumer, I'm thrilled at the way news is going. It better suits our generations. In a very real way it is survival of the fittest. I think you were also right in pulling in the music parallel. I believe that the news industry should take a huge cue from what is going on with music, which is slightly frightening as a hopeful provider of news because as it stands, the music industry is losing--if it weren't for concerts I believe many artists would never make it beyond their garage with the present state of affairs. But journalists can't really host concerts...what will save us?
I think you are giving us really good insights about why not having newspaper will be beneficial to us. However it seems to me that not having newspapers at all in the future will be a little bit drastic. I think they symbolized greatly journalism. This is how we started, even before TV was newspapers were. So I would say that, yes, it is good and very convenient to have other sources to get information like online newspapers, but I think we still need the hard copy type of news. There are people out there that still want their hard copy of news. There are also others like me that frighten that TV news will disappear along with newspapers, and so, I will probably have to face unemployment and look for other job like many print journalist are doing.
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