March 11, 2007
Newspaper of the future
Have you noticed the newspapers you have been reading for years are shrinking in size? Have you seen the stories about newspapers cutting staff and shifting resources to their online products? What’s going on?
We keep hearing that newspapers are in trouble, circulation is falling, so is revenue, and the web is to blame.
According to a Carnegie Corp. survey, the average age of newspaper readers is 55. Young readers aren't getting the news from newspapers.
Increasingly, younger readers are getting their information online from web sites that are updated constantly, throughout the day.
Every day, I attend a news meeting where the various editors discuss the stories we will put into the paper that will be delivered to you in the morning.
When it’s my turn to let the editors know the stories we have added to the web site every afternoon, most of the stories I mention will be the same ones that are published in tomorrow’s paper.
Why are young readers not reading the paper?
That's what we are trying to figure out.
Is it because too many of the stories in the morning newspaper are the same stories they were reading online yesterday?
So what do we do? Should newspapers stop carrying wire stories and only publish local stories, assuming readers are getting their national news online? What about our web edition- should we put those national stories online, or should we assume web readers are getting their national news from cnn.com, msnbc.com, google or yahoo.
The Web allows us to provide you with real time news, audio, and video, and offers us unlimited space, so we can provide much more in-depth coverage of subjects than would be possible in the daily newspaper.
This is an exciting, although a bit scary time, as we are in the process of defining how news will be delivered to future generations of readers.
This blog will discuss our journey along the information superhighway of the future, and how we deal with all the roadblocks and potholes we encounter along the way.
I hope you will provide your input as we shape the future of journalism.
Posted by Bustraan on March 11, 2007 6:08 PM
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