Are newspapers really becomong obsolete?

93Devil,

Those were the excuses 10 years ago. Now you can read the "paper" on your cell phone on the crapper, at the dinner table, on the subway, etc., etc. and listen to music to boot. And it doesn't cost extra.

 

And boxscores rule on a computer. Much easier to read, and a boatload of related info is just a click away.

 

But you still cannot get the same amount of information in a short period of time as you can reading a paper.

I disagree on the boxscores.

 

Yeah, you can get more. No question "newspapers" are becoming obsolete, but there will still be the appetite for news. It's just going to change platforms.

Hell, TV and radio are in as much danger of their medium going straight to the web as newspapers are.

 

Can anyone here work their cell phone from story to story with one hand?

Can anyone lay a PDA in front of them while they are eating and read multiple stories?

Sure, newspapers are taking a hit and adapting, but it will be at least 10-15 years before technology can give us something comparable to a folding paper.

 

Well, that's OK news for the 50-year-olds among us, but not so great for the 30-year-olds. And all the good internets jobs will be taken by then.

 

When I first got my present job a few years ago I passed the local junior hockey owner in the hallway on the way to the dressing room.
Just out of the blue I stopped him and asked what was new. He gave me a bombshell that he was thinking of moving the team next year.
I made a few calls and it turns out he was shopping the team around.
I wrote the story and went to the next game.
I got there late and stopped to talk to the photographer between periods. He told me to take a look around. A lot of papers in the stands and in the press box the entire team's brass, GM, ass. GM, and others had the paper open to my story.
It was news to all of them..
It was one of my best moments in this business.

 

Who owns the Junior Hockey Chiefs anyway? I don't know.

 

On the flip side, why read from a selection of a few dozen stories, many of them edited down to a few inches, instead of spending that time on a medium that gives you access to almost infinite amounts of information, via delivery technology that can be tailored to give you only stories on subjects that interest you rather than a delivery medium that makes you flip through pages of stuff that doesn't appeal to you just in the hopes of finding a few that does? (And I say this as someone who regularly picks up a paper on his way to lunch, but then again, as a former journalist, I read the paper in a different way than other readers)

And yes, it'd be a few years before technology produces something similar to a folding newspaper (though I think it'll be sooner than 10-15 years, seeing that they are already showing prototypes of folding soft screens and such). But what does it say about the future of a paper product when more and more people are already turning away from it, removing it from their daily routines or not building it into their routines to begin with, despite the absence of any comparable alternative?

 

Two things I will never understand:

--- The appeal of watching video on a cellphone.
--- The appeal of reading on a cellphone.

I will take my 51-inch HDTV, my 20-inch monitor and my 21-inch newspaper any day of the week.

 

Depends on where you live. In most small towns, where HS sports would be the biggest deal, people are going to skew away from print a lot more slowly. Couple of reasons:

1) I don't want to generalize, but small-town people tend to be less web-savvy than city folk. (I'm not making fun, I've been on both sides of this thing).

2) The people most interested in HS sports -- the parents -- don't care about seeing their kids' name online. They want to see it on newsprint. A web page printed on plain white paper doesn't look as good in a scrapbook.

 

Colin Cowherd was discussing the Pirates having their press conference introducing John Doe (i mean Russell) as their new manager today (Monday) when the Steelers were playing at home on MNF (way to synergize CC) and the Dodgers were introducing Torre. I see his point in a next day's newspaper kind of way, but it is also possible that the shortening of the news cycle makes his point moot. Most people get their news from sources other than newspapers. TV, radio and the Internet have been reporting the Russell news for a couple of days. When is the last time a press conference broke news. Further, if the Pirates wanted to make a big splash with their hire, would they have hired Russell in the first place?