Is print really dying?
Stories suggest that even the mighty New York Times will give up its print edition, and that the future of journalism — dismal at best in this age of the amateur blogger — is online.
One must sift through the hype. It's dubious that the Times is going anywhere soon. But the old content-delivery systems — those involving printers, the postal service, trucking fleets and newsstand chains — are declining in front of our eyes.
What's keeping print alive? One factor, as a colleague said the other day, is that old guys still like it.
Sure we do. But I know a number of cohorts who get most of their daily news online. They read books on a Kindle. They text their kids.
Another holdup is that the technological revolution has a way to go. To paraphrase Churchill, we're only at the end of the beginning.
Take digital editions. My own company sends them, so I shouldn't criticize. But what are they?
Really old guys will remember that when television started, the shows used radio formats. An announcer stood on a stage in front of a microphone. Then TV developed its own style.
Digital magazine editions are similar. They're an attempt to graft a 20th century format onto a 21st century one.
Yes, they provide a level of interactivity that a print publication can't, but I suspect they'll look less magaziney in time and morph into something else.
A final problem is that the Internet is awash with bad information.
Case in point: Wikipedia. I've seen too many wrong dates on there to believe anything that pretends to have real substance.
Our journalistic rules are simple. We won't even trust the name of a city unless it's from a reliable news organization — and maybe not even then.
See you online.
