Enjoy your morning paper. While you can.
Last week I linked to a Dan Lyons Newsweek piece postulating that new technologies are going to usher in a "new golden age of journalism," and I agree completely. But here's a piece from Megan McArdie's blog for the Atlantic that has a slightly different slant: Newspapers in particular aren't just getting smaller, scarcer, etc. – the industry as we know it is dead. Money quote:
I think we're witnessing the end of the newspaper business, full stop, not the end of the newspaper business as we know it. The economics just aren't there. At some point, industries enter a death spiral: too few consumers raises their average costs, meaning they eventually have to pass price increases onto their customers. That drives more customers away. Rinse and repeat . . . For twenty years, newspapers have been trying to slow the process with increasingly desperate cost cutting, but almost all are at the end of that rope; they can't cut their newsroom or production staff any further and still put out a newspaper. There just aren't enough customers who are willing to pay for their product what it costs to produce it.
McArdle thinks the U.S. will end up with a handful of national papers, like the U.K., rather than a large number of smaller, more local papers, and that news websites won't take root unless they can pay writers a middle-class salary. I don't necessarily agree with the first point – I think local papers will survive around population centers, just at a much smaller size than what we see today. But the latter certainly is true; hard to imagine many journalists sticking with this career path "churning out blog copy for pennies a word."
