Remember typewriters? Remember the street news vendors and newsagents where you picked up your newspaper? Are they soon to be yet another relic of the past? Apart from about three copies of the CBN a year, bought for professional reasons, it is years since I bought a newspaper.
I read my newspapers online and can read them all if I wish; they have much more content and are free.
Newspaper proprietors are now trying to figure out how they can charge online browsers but the biggest among them, such as Arianna Huffington and Rupert Murdoch, are at odds on this one.
The locals battle for survival as advertisers migrate to online advertising; twitter, blogposts etc. They find it difficult to balance the books: The advertising revenue has to pay for copy content; printing, publishing, and distribution. The hard copies can’t compete on space or timing. Example: My recent If Britain Goes Bust article.
The locals didn’t have the space and anyway, the soonest it could be published would be six days – 14 days hence.
At 8am the editor of Spanish News snapped it up and it went on our forums. By midnight it had been read by nearly 8,000 people.
As a journalist I like both hard copy and online. As a realist I know that online information is the future. In particular I prefer it because it returns power to the people. In the past limited space content was rigidly controlled by the newspaper proprietor. It was censorship masquerading as a free press: it never was. “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” – A.J Liebling.
