The death of newspapers

In the last six months, a large number of newspapers in the US have closed shop pleading lack of advertising money and blaming competition from the free news of the internet as the prime cause. The fact is that today young people chose to get most of their news from the internet rather than the print version. Defenders of the paper newspapers argue that with the death of the industry, there will be no investigative journalism and that foreign news will decline in quality since they will not have funds for foreign correspondents. They also argue that the charm of newspapers is that your eye may often be caught by a news item that you were not looking for but find interesting. All true but unfortunately facts remain facts—the number of readers has declined sharply leading to lower advertising revenues leading to fewer journalists. The NYT now has 1000 while the Washington Post has about 800 staff on their rolls.

Analyzing my own newspaper reading habits, I find that when I read the Washington Post, I skip over more than half of the paper- having no interest in an 8 page section on basketball and baseball, or 4 pages on obituaries, another 4 pages on local gossip and TV trivia and occasional three pages on foreign issues of remote interest. I would imagine that many newspaper readers have had similar reactions in the past but had no alternatives to fall back on. But now with the internet, you can really design your own daily newspaper which focuses on your interests and can also bring the best journalists from around the world to your table.

My internet newspaper thus provides me daily headlines from New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and BBC. This is supplemented by Times of India, Economic Times and The Hindu. I can pull in columnists like David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Eugene Robinson and Frank Rich from the US press, Ed Luce, Clive Crook from UK , Swaminathan Aiyer and Vir Sanghvi from India. The daily newspapers can be supplemented with Newsweek, Time, Outlook and Newsline (Pakistan). By adding feeds from bloggers like Robert Reich, Andrew Sullivan and Joe Klein, you are also able to keep abreast with the latest analysis by the pundits. You can lighten this up with a comic strip from Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts and a crossword from Tribune. If I can do this at no cost, why would I want to contribute to a newspaper that provides so little in comparison to the wealth I can draw upon from around the world on a regular basis?

Clearly the newspaper industry needs to find a different business model when the competition can offer such a wealth of choice and coverage. Perhaps they can offer each one of its readers a custom designed internet newspaper for a fee.