Re: Re: How to Save the Newspapers

From: "mountainman0074" 

>I began my newspaper career at age 11, delivering about 30 daily papers in the hood.  That got me started reading as a daily habit.  At the same time, the paper provided free issues to elementary and middle schools once a week, to foster reading skills and ulteriorly to get kids hooked on newspapers.  So I've been a life-long reader of magazines and newspapers.
> 
> That's the way you get 20-somethings to read the paper - start 10 or 15 years earlier.  Not, as Dvorak points out, by emulating their life- and thought-styles.
> 
> However, the death of print is inevitable.  Print is just the most recent, before radio, TV and the internet, technology for recording and transmitting information.  Think Babylonian clay tablets, Egyptian scribes/priests, cave drawings, etc.  Fast forward to Gutenberg.
> 
> Information is what writing and journalism is all about.  Those processes will thrive and survive.  So, I agree with Dvorak - the buildings and printing presses are obsolescing.  And I, too, have noticed a deterioration in the quality of writing and journalism as the bean counters try to downsize their way into profitability.  By pushing editors and writers out the door and into other publishing technologies, the bean counters are accelerating the downfall of print.
> 

That is an interesting view mountainman; here and there I do agree. Certainly in each time period we are looking at different forms of delivery.

But there is an important difference. Universal literacy is a feature of only the last 100 to 150 years, and modern democracy of barely 200. As major media radio is hardly a century old, film a century, television perhaps 50 years. Each of these has an ephemeral quality, almost a dreamlike one. The printed page as a popular culture - is only about 150 years old and a more solid form.

Each new entrant has gained new ground as well as tending to impinge on the area of the previous ones. But the knock out blows to earlier forms, like the scribes, are much less obvious. Each of the technologies of the past couple of centuries have tended to create a mix, rather than produce a winner. 

The question is what is a satisfactory level for any one. Book titles have advanced 10-fold in sixty years [five-fold since 2002]. At which level are they 'knocked out'? Newspapers in the UK during WWII were single fold; four broadsheet pages! The Sunday Times has for a few years regularly had editions in excess of 100 pages [200 if you count the magazines]. Where do you pitch the 'end of the paper'?

Raio, tv and film are far more recent, and have a lesser history. Yet all were a threat to the printed word. And the printed word thrived. 

My assessment of the net is that it has spawned a massive expansion of literate expression, both through book technologies and through the electronic 'village pumps', the coffee machine. To my eyes it is the total market that has expanded, rather than the net being a new entrant to a limited market.

What most impresses me is the vast increase in news interest. I am fascinated to see how this plays out, but because the news cannot be collected cheaply payment will be necessary. I think there will be a whole set of options for subscribers, and the physical paper will continue to flourish at levels familiar in the 50s and sixties.

And we still use stone for permanent records ;-).

Joseph Harris  -  Debt Control Man
author: Control Your Debt Crisis on Your Own Terms
blog: http://debtcontrolman.wordpress.com
http://www.controlyourdebtcrisis.co.uk
debt dictionary: http://www.controlyourdebtcrisis.co.uk/debtwiki/


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