Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There was a story this week on Bloomberg.com entitled “Newspapers Lose Readers, Advertisers, Now Analysts,” which looks at an interesting tangent to the “print is dead” debate. The story states that, with the newspaper industry in trouble and lots of people who work for newspapers having already lost their jobs (because either their papers have cut back on staffing or else have gone out of business), the woe is starting to spread. Now other sectors of newspaper-related employment are also being put out of work, specifically, newspaper analysts: “Merrill Lynch & Co. analyst Lauren Rich Fine left this month after 19 years covering the newspaper industry,” writes Bloomberg.com. “Last month, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Christa Sober Quarles dropped coverage of newspaper stocks. John Morton has stopped writing his industry newsletter after 30 years, saying readers were sick of the bad news.” In fact, these guys feel so disenfranchised that one analyst is quoted in the article as saying, “being the newspaper analyst [for his firm] is like being the Maytag repairman.” This proves that there will be much collateral damage in terms of a electronic future, and that the eventual impact from the changes brought on by an increasingly digital world will be deep and far-reaching. So the more prepared we can be as an industry in terms of workflow and the way we do business, the more prepared we’ll be to handle the great change that is headed our way.

Bloomberg.com: Newspapers Lose Readers, Advertisers, Now Analysts