Who's Killing the Newspaper?

Remember when bowl cuts were cool? When a Walkman was a status symbol? Is the newspaper becoming the next to fade? A recent article in the New York Times chronicled the slow death of the newspaper industry. The article reported that in the last year national circulation of newspapers fell 10 percent. Revenue from ads also dropped 16 percent, and that trend shows no signs of slowing. The San Francisco Chronicle has lost the most blood; circulation of the paper fell over 25 percent. Right now newspapers are facing their biggest threat since the Depression, but this isn’t the 1930s, so who’s killing the newspaper?

America is going online. Instead of a cup of coffee and the newspaper in the morning people are changing in the paper form of news for the digital form. Why not though? Most online newspaper access is completely free. Circulation newspapers find themselves having to raise their subscription price to try and make up for lost revenue. This is only giving readers all the more reason to type in a URL rather than flip through the pages. The New York Times reported that this year newspaper sites have had over 72 million viewers a month, up from 60 million last year. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s free; online newspapers are the future, well that is if the future isn’t already here right now.

As the newspaper industry keeps bleeding what is happening to America’s democracy as a result? An article from The New Yorker suggests that the newspaper industry is about to be passed by the internet as the premier provider of political news for American readers, especially for young readers. Young people simply don’t read the newspaper on a daily basis, we have grown up in the .com boom; the internet is part of our identity. The internet promotes civic culture in our country. It serves as an open network of information; mashing both lifestyle and traditional politics into one conglomerate of civic media.

America is changing. Servers are replacing paperboys, and blogs are replacing letters to the editor. It is sad to see the demise of once such a prominent industry; an industry that severed as America’s political backbone for so long. The newspaper will never completely be extinct, but certainly some species are dying. Newspapers now have to face the question of charging readers for online access. A ship can only hold so much water before it sinks; the newspaper industry needs to come up with something to patch the holes. The internet is racing ahead, replacing most forms of traditional news. Is it that far out of the question to think that after the newspaper maybe the internet will take on television?