

The Newspaper Industry Is Dying Before Our Very Eyes - gravitycop
http://www.coastalpost.com/09/01/07.html

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johngunderman
Quite frankly, I don't see this as being too much of a problem. The main
purpose of newspapers is to inform people of happenings in the world (duh).
With the advent of the internet, this has become less and less necessary
because individuals now have a plethora of outlets from which to receive their
news. They no longer are constrained to buying a package of papers in order to
learn what is going on around them. I'm not saying that newspapers are bad,
quite the opposite. I just figure that printed news is no longer as important
as it used to be.

The author mentions he is worrying about who will be the "watchdogs" of the
politicians, etc. This worry is ungrounded. One only has to observe such
things as the blogosphere to know that as long as the internet is not a
censored medium, we will have our watchdogs. I'll admit that with user
generated news the average quality of news decreases. This is only due to the
quantity of "worthless" news that circulates the net. I think that the
newspaper industry will never die completely, as people do enjoy reading from
paper. Still, it must drastically shrink according to basic economics. It can
only be as large as demand allows it to be. There is no reason to consider
this a "bad thing".

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Tichy
I wonder about the more costly research, though. What about dangerous
investigations (for example in war zones). Blogging might not pay for
everything that is necessary. That said, ultimately I hope that things will
turn out OK somehow...

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dougp
<http://www.michaeltotten.com/> this journalist travels all over warzones and
is independant.

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satyajit
Its sad. Given the internet age, the newspaper story comes little late -
people have taught themselves to find the news as current as few minutes ago,
or even live coverage on internet. So newspaper industry needs a revolutionary
shift in order to survive. And with so much available to read these days, who
really has time to go through a thick news paper? So may be they need to trim
it down. Advertising is another story altogether - even I believe TV
advertising revenue is going down as more and more people switch to DVRs, they
skip thru the ads. Technology is the culprit to make all these obsolete, and
by technology, I mean you :-)

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micks56
The father of a friend of mine from college sells software that newspapers use
to do their layouts as well as the printers that make the papers. His
customers include the very large newspapers across the US as well as the
smaller local papers.

My friend told me in 1999/2000 that his father had declining sales. More and
more papers were either not buying the next version, putting off purchasing
decisions, or simply going out of business or consolidating.

So the 1999-2000 time frame is obviously not pre-internet. But I think there
are other factors besides people reading the newspaper on the internet instead
of buying a print version.

I canceled my subscription because the delivery person couldn't get it to my
front door. Sometimes the paper landed on the roof of my house. Sometimes he
put it in the snow in front of my house. Other times it simply got rained on.

I also think the custom of reading the daily paper is going away. People
aren't just reading the paper online instead of in print. They are watching
the 6pm news instead of reading the print paper. Maybe even more people aren't
doing that.

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shafqat
I think the future of news is intelligent, curated, aggregation. People aren't
going to a single trusted source anymore. News organizations that can become
to go-to news hub that aggregates the latest/best stories from around the web,
and supplements it with local and editorial, have a chance of winning. At
NewsCred, we're working on a bunch of interesting projects to enable this...

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iron_ball
Aggregate what? Quality reporting is difficult and expensive.

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lacker
Newspapers won't disappear entirely. The point of aggregation is that by
filtering and organizing the news, even if there is only 1% of the amount of
quality reporting as there was in 1990, you can still get better reporting
overall.

I would prefer a Hacker News based on only 1% of the original reporting that
there is today, rather than a fully funded New York Times.

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brandnewlow
I don't understand what this means.

If we only had %1 as many stories out there, this would be quite a boring
place.

I asked Kevin Rose once about niche social news sites, and he told me that
taking a social approach to aggregation is a "drastic solution" that requires
a drastic problem.

If we only had %1 as many news stories being reported, would the problem still
be drastic enough to require a solution like this?

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gravitycop
From the article:

 _The average entry-level reporter's wages are $25,167 a year, according to
Payscale.com. And today's beginning reporters are asked to do more than those
starting just a few years before. "In some cases it means being able to go out
and report the story, write for online, shoot video, edit from the field, and
update for the print edition. And in some cases it means shooting the
pictures, creating a slideshow, putting it in Flash, and doing all that in
addition to reporting," [...]

These are the low-pay jobs. There are also the no-pay jobs popular with Web
site management. Young journalists are encouraged to blog and post on a
variety of no-pay Web sites. This is supposed to help them find employment,
and it probably does. But it certainly does violence to the old slogan of a
day's work for a day's pay.

Or, journalists can hustle grants from foundations or wealthy individuals to
pay for their reporting._

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brandnewlow
I've never met a journalist who got into it for the money. So that explanation
never convinces me.

Reasons I have heard for why people do it:

1\. Anger at wealthy elites and politicians. 2\. Desire to tell people the
truth about what's going on. 3\. Likes to see their byline out in the public.
4\. Enjoys meeting random people, having access to the rich and powerful
across many segments of society. 5\. Can't hack it as an actor, celebrity, but
still wants some measure of fame and glory. 6\. Likes to tell stories.

I've never met anyone who went into journalism to get rich. Most I know have
more or less decided they're going to be poor for a long time to come.

But they have great stories at parties.

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volida
of course print will die. It's so last century What else did you expect?

