Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The March/April issue of Mother Jones has a feature entitled “Breaking the News,” which is a package of stories looking at the recent downward spiral of newspapers, but coming at it from a different direction: “It’s not the Internet that’s killing newspapers. It’s the equity-chasing investors and their friends at the FCC who have put outsize profits before a free press.” The story “Don’t Blame the Internet for the Media’s Woes” by Eric Klinenberg most directly addresses aspects of the “print is dead” debate, putting all of the trends and numbers in perspective, and offering a unique analysis on the problem I’ve not seen elsewhere. “What’s really at risk here is not the future of newspapers but of the news itself,” writes Klinenberg in a sober assessment of what’s really happening; he alone seems to realize that this isn’t about paper, but is instead about news. It’s not at all about the format.

From the story: “Obviously, the newspaper business is changing. The Internet has made it harder to sustain high profit margins, not because readers are abandoning news but because publishers have not yet figured out how to make more money from their websites. Until now, papers sustained themselves by selling a physical product and the ad space in it. With online readers refusing to pay for what they read and web ads generating pennies on the dollar, the old model is collapsing. As Jay R. Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, told Editor & Publisher, newspapers are ‘finding whole new pockets of audiences for which they get no credit,’ clocking record-breaking readership figures if online traffic is included. But online advertising will account for just 6 percent of newspapers’ $50 billion in ad revenues in 2007, the Newspaper Association of America predicts.”

Mother Jones: Don’t Blame the Internet for the Media’s Woes