Newspapers may have a big carbon footprint, but printed news is important in local communities for many people who don't have easy access to smart phones or computers. There's plenty other things that I think can be dropped before the paper.
People used to leave newspapers in the trash, on the train, all over the place. Anyone could pick them up and read for free. I think it's reasonable for folks to carry this attitude into the digital age. People feel like news is something to share, it's not the source of creative expression, it's facts and as such we feel entitled to know the facts about our world and what is happening that might affect us.
Interesting article about newspapers, but touches on bigger issues of media in general. With real time media that you can access for modern gadgets that are almost always accessible, there's going to be a constant decrease in need for a paper based media. The only reasons for them would be in situations where gadgets are not usable, such as no wireless capabilities, running out of batteries on long flights and such. Will those situations alone save printed media? At some point it won't be, and we'd just live with the fact that we need to download news to read ahead of time, or get some outlets on all the seats in an airplane ;)
We used to have a printed newspaper that was run off a large press, consuming tons of paper and many gallons of ink, delivered by truck and car to stores and homes, every day, 363 days per year (Thanksgiving and Christmas Day were the exceptions).
Now, the paper has closed and we get news online. It's not quite the same as relaxing in a chair with a printed paper and a cup of coffee, but I'm guessing the per-capita resources used every day are a small fraction.
The problems
People are not reading newspapers or magazines anymore. Mobile web, tablets etc are taking over.
Newspapers are cumbersome on public transport and to carry around. They are filled with news that we are not interested in. The content isn’t targeted or tailored for individuals. Half the weight of glossy magazines is advertising.
Print publications waste a lot of paper
Not everyone is going to own a tablet
Publishers don’t always publish full articles from their magazines and newspapers in digital format. There’s still some content they keep for printed editions in the hope of selling more magazines.
The human truth
As much as we want a paperless society, a vast majority of us still prefer reading on paper. And we’d happily pay a little more to not have our content filled with advertising.
The idea
On Demand, printed, personalized news service facilitated by automated laser printer kiosks.
These kiosks would act like aggregators of all forms of written news. Users could customize preferences online or through an app before swiping their card and collecting their own Small Run edition.
The benefits
Business:
More efficient print publishing
Highly measurable consumer data – publishers can see what content is most popular and create more of it
Simplified, digital delivery system means no trucks needed to deliver papers
No wastage
Consumer
Highly customized, more up to date printed magazines at a convenient size for transport and travel
Less paper use
Optional advertising
More choice and flexibility in content type and format
Newspapers are like the internet in that every single day people waste an hour or more of their life reading them. They also clutter your living room and raise your carbon footprint. And also... reading the Daily Mail or The Guardian everyday can't be good for you! Realistically they're not as bad as TV or the net though.
The problem is that the cost of generating and distributing that local news is not sustainable in the face of internet technologies.
Witness this: I'm at a graduation celebration in Wisconsin this weekend, and all the parents attending throughout the day are very involved in student athletics. One of the kids was running in a track competition out of town with the rest of the school. The results were texted immediately throughout this small town. Another parent was tweeting the play by play of the track meet.
These are tech savvy 40 year olds, completely bypassing the print world. What can print offer them? Maybe a pic or two? They've got those instantly via FB. If this crowd is doing it, it's over for print papers.
And since online papers either need a paywall or higher revenue for ads, they just can't compete.
The point is that it takes a hell of a lot less energy to display something on a screen for a couple of minutes versus printing it out; and it leaves a lot less paper trash lying around, specifically none.
You don't have to agree, but it's obviously something to consider. I still get a daily newspaper, and I'm always on the verge of cancelling it both because it's such a waste of resources and it's a chore to have to throw out a pile of paper every few weeks.
Newspapers-- it was once considered a professional requirement to read them daily. Beyond local news-- you were really on your information game if you read the NY Times or Wall Street Journal.
The printed paper format seems to lend itself more easily to tripping over interesting articles that you might not normally seek out. Versus mindless, repetitive web surfing.
And of course, if you wanted to share a news item with someone-- it meant cutting it out and mailing via the postal service. Usually, accompanied with a brief handwritten note. Always nice to receive. Now a lost art form.
I like reading the newspaper -- print, rather than online -- specifically because it comes out only once a day. It's not an endless stream of pretend-immediate attention-grabbers, but a curated collection of the important stuff that happened yesterday.
If the print newspaper were invented today, it would grab hundreds of millions of VC money in Silicon Valley as the cure for news overload. (I guess the pitch would have to include some silly AI or IoT angle though.)
I'm seeing a lot of people making the judgmental mistake of thinking that news is simply read on paper because no one has established a sufficient way of accessing it online. I'm sorry but this is just a fallacy, until I can read my news at the kitchen table, on the sofa and on the toilet then newspaper still has a significant use.
I mean it's a quite dismal future, if everyone gets up in the morning and sits in front of a computer eating their cereal so they can read the news.
News, and likewise information, will become ever increasingly available. The first publicly available newspapers were government-published tablets posted in public places by Julius Caesar, the Chinese circulated news to court officials in the 8th century.
Eventually news will become more accessible through digital media, but this isn't going to happen anytime soon. Portable devices aren't ubiquitous enough yet and so news isn't freely available enough on digital media to take over the ultimately portable disposable newspaper. I can take a newspaper, read it at breakfast, on the toilet, on the bus, at work and then when I'm done with it I can discard it. Until I can do all the same, except discard it, with a digital device then the newspapers won't be destroyed, they'll merely recede.
Newspapers are going to suffer more from attrition than an assault. There's so many people who've read their news from a paper every morning, that's a habit that is largely unbreakable. You can't stop a 60 year old picking up a news paper. My father's in his 50's, has worked in IT since the beginning yet he still sits down with a newspaper. Newspapers won't die until their readership does. This gives the newspapers a long time to adapt to current technology and establish a brand amongst the younger age group in a fashion that allegories the elder age group.
The other assumption people make, is that news will become more refined and from local sources. This assumption is quite laughable, local sources are increasingly irrelevant. Yes it's good to get the news from your home town, however do you really think that matters anymore? I live in Canada, so why do I care about Obama in the US or Brown in the UK? Because they both affect me. I've been to a dozen countries and I know people from even more and this is becoming the norm in our current era of civilization. The whole notion of globalization dictates that we're going to begin caring about world events more and more as they increasingly affect us. Just look at the economic crisis, the US fudged the brownie, but it's affected nearly every country and person on the planet, so why wouldn't people be paying attention to news like that?
You want me to buy 10 news papers in case I find an interesting article posted on some site like HN or reddit? Paper waste (just more trash for me even if I don't care a about the environment). Most papers publish articles daily or every few hours too. What if I want to read an article of a paper circulated in los angeles and I live in florida?
I hope more newspapers follow their lead. Printing paper editions daily sounds inefficient and wasteful. By the time the morning newspaper hits the streets everyone already heard about the news on TV or read about it online. I expect daily print to go away as we get better choices for reading news on the go and more people start using Kindles, netbooks, iPhones, etc.
I'm going to be the devil's advocate for a second and ask the hard question: "Why would you ?".
In an age where the level of connectivity and communication is so high, most content can be found on the Internet and that before the newspaper is printed.
Reading a newspaper requires buying the newspaper. Reading an electronic newspaper requires buying a computer or a phone and an Internet subscription, that's orders of magnitude more.
In my small community we have a weekly paper that they deliver every Friday for free. I love it. It was recently bought out and the quality has gone down hill, but I still enjoy reading about what’s going on hyper locally.
I’m the minority however. Most of my neighbors never bother to bring it in off their driveway. The papers tend to sit until the next garbage day at which point it goes from driveway to garbage bin.
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