Newspaper - Will it dissapear?

[MrTwi]

Originally Posted by Bigblu10

Fact of the matter is by the time news gets printed on paper and you read it, it is old news already.

When the Town Criers ruled the day, the news was already a month old. As print became more prevalent AND as the population learned to read, news might have been a week old. Eventually the daily newspaper became a reasonable invention. This is ancient technology and as the non-tech savvy baby boomers die, so will print media. As early as 2000, newspapers knew the end was coming, it was only a matter of time as to when PCs became popular. They had no way to know the mobile devices would eventually mean the end to PCs.

And so they built digital newspapers. Print newspapers revenue stream did not come from circulation but from advertising. The digital version threw up ads, ads that started to change, then be animated, then targeted you via cookies. Finally consumers of the news got fed up and block ads. Newspapers have started to rebel and put up paywalls. That won't last. We are a society that demands free access to news. This is especially true in that "newspapers" are no longer just news but many are tainted with bias in one form or the other putting opinions in WITH the news. Thats not news, its propaganda. They are selling their opinions in echo chambers. Finding pure news is difficult, but it does exist.

The new Town Crier is instant news. Flipboard, one app, allows one to curate the news but it still gets news from biased sources. Few companies do original research. They just point to another news source who in turn won't even tell you their source, its just "from an anonymous source familiar with the situation" which means nothing. But you can go to the source and get the news instantly. Its in the form of a little blue bird. Find a reporter or source providing instant news. For example, during the Boston Bombings, the Boston PD was tweeting live what was going on. No filter, no bias, just the news. No need to wait until some newspaper or TV station told you what was happening. Instant, true, and unbiased news. Today, there are producers of news tweeting what's going on as they talk to actual human beings, and not "someone familiar with the situation". Find them and you have instant, unbiased news.

Paper newspapers? They will die with the non-tech savvy baby boomers.

Digital newspapers? The will die behind paywalls where only those in the echo chambers willing to pay.

Instant news is twitter from multiple sources, curated by ... yourself.

BTW, local newspapers are also dying. Many have already moved to digital versions. At least they tend to be more objective.