Life After Print: Long live magazines!

[Shelton Bumgarner]

I have come to the conclusion that print newspapers are going to die
off significantly faster than any of us are willing to admit. Huge
titanic shifts are happening in the print market. The only thing that
is not stopping the presses right now is money, audience inertia, and
how impractical porting around an expensive laptop to read information
in the bathroom is.

The problem is that the gap between when money can be made online
selling the content that would otherwise be found in the hardcopy
edition of the newspaper will probably be huge for a long time. Too
long to easily save the print newspaper business.

So, it is actually possible that major newspapers (or chains) will
actually fold, go bankrupt, be no more. "Finishie teacha, finishie,"
as one of my students might say. They will be replaced by blogs. Now,
where all the original reporting would come from is the important
question.

But I don't really see that happening because even if they do begin to
lose significant amounts of money, they still provide a service. The
current restructuring going on in the newspaper business probably will
continue apace, and eventually speed up significantly.

Newspapers - the ones that survive this switch over in eras - will
actually get much stronger. They will likely be much leaner, though.
The main problem I have with the fate of newspapers right now is they
are lumbering, slow moving business beasts. They are re-active, never
pro-active when it comes to change. And that might very well kill some
of them.

Long term, I think most print media will become magazines. Magazines
are a concept that will last while daily newspapers in print form
won't. So, it's possible that there long after the newsprint version
of The New York Times is no more, a magazine version of it with really
thick stock paper and lots of cool pictures will remain.