Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The new issue of the Columbia Journalism Review has a really long, and pretty interesting, essay on its website by Robert Kuttner entitled “The Race,” which talks about the future of newspapers and journalism in an increasingly web-centered world. More than just the usual think-piece, Kuttner has also talked to editors around the country, getting their take on everything from bloggers to the “print is dead” debate. The aim of the essay is to “[explore] whether newspapers as we know them are likely to endure, and why we should care.” Kuttner makes several good arguments about what’s currently happening, how many newspapers are indeed adapting to a digital age (while several more, unfortunately, are not), and Kuttner ultimately concludes that it’s not about the physical format but that it’s instead about — as Jeff Jarvis calls it — the “service” that journalism provides.

From the essay: “Despite the seeming anachronism of paper in a digital age, however, the economics of the business require newspapers to persist as partly print media for at least another generation. Some Americans still want to pick up a daily paper rather than read content on a screen. And as a business proposition, the average monetary value of a visitor to a newspaper’s Web site is only 20 to 30 percent of a newspaper’s print reader; Web ads command lower rates because of the greater competition among Web sites. So even if a newspaper shut down its print operation, published only on the Internet, and somehow managed to keep its entire circulation, the revenue loss would exceed the cost savings.”

CJR: “The Race”