Print media death

Everyone from the Rocky Mountain News to the New Yorker has made notice of the decline of the newspaper. With the increase of electronic media, some are worried that the time-honored tradition of print media will die out.

In the 2008 New Yorker article "Out of Print," Eric Alterman said, "trends in circulation and advertising –– the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising –– have created a palpable sense of doom."

While this impending "doom" is making those of us in the print game a bit nervous, it may be a sign of the times and a proverbial "natural selection" that will separate the weak from the strong.

Unfortunately, the tendency of online sources is to be short and direct in their information, which can cause the versions that are reported to be horribly condensed, lacking the full detail one would need to get a true sense of what happened. This also increases the potential of the articles to be biased.

The major problem with gaining information from the internet is most lack the know-how to establish which sources are legitimate. The average American doesn't see the difference between respected and reliable news sources and "Joe the Plummer's" blog page.

As an example of American laziness, the rise of the "tweet" as a valid form of information gathering is truly disheartening.

According to Alterman, The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by 54 percent from the end of 2004 to the beginning of 2008, most of which was experienced in 2007, following the public launch of Twitter.

According to Scott Gingold, business news examiner for Examiner.com, in a 2008 article titled "Print media dying, television news on life support," stated that however bleak the outlook for print media, the shift in medium comes with the potential for "quality" news-driven Web sites to become popular and relatively mainstream regardless of their previous notoriety.

As a result of this trend, some newspapers have utilized the Internet to save themselves from oblivion by creating electronic versions of their papers as well as forming side-project companies that increase revenue.

The Washington Post Company has avoided going in the direction of companies like The New York Times Company through its testing and prep company Kaplan, which brings in at least half the company's revenue as of 2008.

Yet other companies are choosing to deal with the decline by implementing budget cuts, layoffs, reduction in publication size and other cost-reducing solutions.

There is an abundance of media devoted to the collapse of the newspaper and print industry.

In 2004, Philip Meyer predicted that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on someone's doorstep in 2043 in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper." This means most college students will see this end.

Additionally, in 2008 a $450 million Newseum was opened in Washington, D.C. as a response to this phenomenon and in anticipation of the disappearance of the newspaper.

Ironically, many groups are utilizing the Internet to monitor this trend.

The webpage NewspaperDeathWatch.com, authored by Paul Gillin, a newspaper enthusiast and journalist, is devoted to observing and documenting the decline of the newspaper. There is a side bar on the home page as well that details the newspapers that have "died" since the Web site's creation in March 2007.

In addition there is a group on Facebook.com titled "Are print media dying?" and a twitter page "themediaisdying," all of which are devoted to monitoring the decline of print media.

Hope is not lost, however by picking up this paper and reading this article, you have not only become more informed but helped to slow the decay of our beloved information distributing medium.