WHAT FUTURE IS THERE FOR NEWSPAPER IN THIS DIGITAL ERA?

WHAT FUTURE IS THERE FOR NEWSPAPERS IN THIS DIGITAL ERA?

Is it a dim future for print journalism (newspapers)? Have newspapers been dying in a slow motion in this digital age.

Someone once said that in the future all media will be free.

 (NZME Managing editor Shayne Currie told a conference on the news media last year: “We made a big mistake when we made content available free. But there’s no going back.”). These days, people are more likely to reach into their pockets to pay for coffee than news. Popular news is no longer necessarily the most detailed and researched piece. In fact, short and entertaining is often a requirement to go viral and the modern media Internet is filled with this kind of content and for the print journalism the challenge is how to remain relevant in a new audience of people who have infinite amounts of choice in terms of where they get their information.

Are newspapers in crisis? Yes, unless they reinvent themselves because readership is moving away from the printed form. Do they have a future? Absolutely, but it's a future that looks quite different from the one they've been used to. It's a ridiculous thought to think that newspapers shouldn't evolve exactly as society all around them evolves. There's a terrible tendency to hold back to the good old days but not here. Information is freely and instantly, available from so many sources that a newspaper cannot naturally consider itself the first port of call for information.

Are newspapers doomed? Absolutely not. Every newspaper has a great future online. End of story. It's not the death of the paper. It's the morphing of the paper from a print version to online. Do they have a future, “yes I think they do. But I'm about to catch a train from Washington to New York, it's 7.40am, there are 30 people waiting to catch the train, and half of them are either on BlackBerries or mobile phones. Two of them are reading newspapers and that's it. Both the readers are in their late forties. That for me is quite a symbolic illustration of the future.” John Ryley, Head of Sky News.

Newspapers in this country are not dying, they are committing suicide.

 It’s nice to see that the printed word is still, at least for now, the most powerful medium for reporting on the death of the printed word.

How many of you went to your pockets got money and bought a newspaper today? Maybe my guess is as good as yours. Will there be a future for print newspapers, only time will tell, but not very much time.