Is the newspaper dying faster than we suspected?
Adrian McDermott
April 9th, 2008
I don’t know how many comments I’ve read on this in the last few days. Obviously, a theme in the news, but I think for a reason - people are realising that this is moving faster than we thought.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports the German National Blogger Conference re:publica panel seeing the transition from paper to web in terms of five to ten years. Not so much breaking news stories so much as the discussions, essays and features. Personally, for these, I am already torn between web and print journalism. Report and reaction can be quickly browsed and compared online, but for me there is also the comfort factor, and the surprise factor, in newspapers - i.e. a in-depth reporting of something I had not thought about before. In online journalism I tend to follow what I am looking for instead. But I expect that, too, will change!
I suspect that the blogger panel is not far wrong. Here in Switzerland we had a daily free tabloid, 20 minutes - which many locals call ‘20 seconds’ - that you pick up while you wait for your train station. It’s pretty sensationalist fare, with front pages regularly led by surveys comparing the sexual habits of various European countries, or by Hollywood gossip or its local equivalents. But now it has no fewer than four rivals, going downmarket, highbrow, business or radical, as you wish. These rivals are produced by the major newspaper publishers here, and are probably soon to be the future replacement for the weekday newspaper - instant news and comment with pictures, localised advertising and lightweight features. It is easy to imagine a date not far away when most people will look online for all the in-depth coverage. After all, the blogosphere is is still only a handful of years old.
Meanwhile, this week the New York Times ran what some saw as an unbalanced story by Matt Richtel about blogging’s health hazards (staying up all night to keep pace with the blogosphere). The fact that it was rather sensationalist shows again that a lot of print journalism that hasn’t quite grasped the wake up call from blog journalists. The blogosphere may be, in a sense, virtual, but for newspapers it is also the new reality.
Tags: New York Times, re:publica