Newspapers Are a Thing of the Past

The Daily Show sent one of their correspondents to the New York Times recently to ask them the very question this motion proposes. It was, as you’d expect, a largely light-hearted interview but Jason Jones made one key point. “Tell me”, he said “what news in your newspaper happened today?”

Years ago news would take weeks to weave its way around the globe. Today it takes seconds. A newspaper can’t respond as quickly as the internet or television can and since old news is not much more than chip wrapper newspapers are going the way of the dodo.

Today, most people get their news via TV networks, mobile phones, computers, kindles, nooks, etc. The newspaper is obsolete. The newspaper used to be the place you could read more about a topic you heard about briefly. Now the internet allows you to read the story more in depth, view comments about it, and read the same story from many different perspectives on other sites. Once the baby boomer generation dies off, newspapers will not circulate. Online it’s easier, quicker, cleaner, free, and more in-depth.

The success of sites such as Reddit and Digg show that people want tailored news. They don’t want a big home and garden section if they’re living in a rented flat. They want the news that suits their preferences and only the internet can provide this.

The internet can pull in only the stories you want to read. What’s more it can learn your tastes too. The more you tell it what you like the more you’ll get what you like. How on earth could a newspaper possibly compete?

Newspapers are not necessarily more convenient. Broadsheets are too big for reading in any crowded space, even tabloid’s can be too big on a busy tube while an ebook reader or phone could still be used. Loosing signal is not really a problem either as the news could be downloaded off websites to be read when there is no connection to the internet.

none of these are likely to be taken as reasons to keep the newspaper, it is better for us to use plain paper to hold chips as we dont really want inc in our food, you can buy umbrellas and coats that are very cheap and take up very little space so can be easily transported, bubble wrap is better for protecting goods and we dont want to encourage fighting on the tube!

The adaption is however likely to involve moving online. Many papers already have large amounts of content avaliable online either for their subscribers or free for everyone. there is the ability to incorperate social media and opinions from everyone, newspapers could even have debatewise on their sites. However if a newspaper is entirely online is it really a newspaper? it no longer has a paper element to it requiring some kind of new name.

While blogs and forums may not have dozens of reporters around the world they are not necessarily needed. They can use ‘citizen journalists’ who will often be on the scene faster than any traditional media’s reporters who may well be based many hundreds of miles away from the story. There is no particular reason to trust traditional newspapers. Their trustworthyness comes not from any particular qualifications but their ability to be on the spot, if the citizen journalists are more on the spot than them they should be as trustable.

Newspapers do not have a monopoly on investigative journalists; online sources like Wikileaks have already proven their ability to hold governments to account by granting public access to wide swathes of classified government information.