News 24/7/365: Offline Newspapers are dying, should we lament or cheer

“Newspapers no longer know how to live long and prosper. It’s enough to make a Vulcan weep.” lamented Maureen Dowd of New York Times.

In his soul-searching editorial Dowd said:
“One of the things Young Spock (indirectly referring to Barack Obama) has to learn in the movie is the difference between what is morally praiseworthy and what is morally obligatory. Newspapers do a praiseworthy job of trying to keep the dark side at bay, by shining sun on it. But society may not consider us obligatory, as we’re finding out.”

Newspapers do a priaseworthy job and so does online newspapers but at a fraction of the cost. We have already over-exploited our environment and printing millions of newpapers daily just adds to pillaging of nature which is most hurtful considering how we can easily accomplish the same much cheaply and equally effectively through the internet.

Internet has long ceased to be a fad and has entered the mainstream public consciousness years ago. Universal internet access is no longer a pipe-dream and is very likely to be achieved in the next 3-4 years across developed world and in large part of the rest of the world too.

Contrary to popular conception, internet is not free. It costs to hosts web servers, to process the data serving the web pages. The cost is in data center maintenance, in electricity bills and in replacing old and damaged hardware. However it is several orders of magintude cheaper than printing millions of newsprints everyday.

Journalism will remain and will even prosper as millions of common people will start participating in the new era of journalism. Journalists are no longer the the stereotype high-falutin, cigar smoking editor of Daily Planet clones but common people on the street who report even as they see from the cell phones or mobile devices. Every blogger focussed on recent events is a journalist too and so are you.

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” who worked for 13 years as a Baltimore Sun reporter, testified that “high-end journalism is dying,” and when that happens, and no one is manning the cop shops and zoning boards, America will enter “a halcyon era for state and local political corruption.”

High-end journalism as in high-quality journalism will not die as people value quality of content any day. In Kolkata there are dozens of newspapers available but most people subscribe just one or two of them. However the way to monetize will have to change.

In the new world of online journalism, margins are lower and news is cheap. You cannot easily charge for something that others are providing for free. So you have to charge for convenience, for availability and quality; more on it later.

Newspapers are also suffering from losing revenue from classifieds, most of which is usurped by likes of craigslist. With their venture into online world, they can reclaim some of it by providing better and more intelligent alternatives.

The era of offline newspapers will soon come to an end and it will save millions of trees worldwide for starters and pollution caused by press & inking materials. We need to cheer the heralding of the new age instead of the demise of dinosaurs, an age where news will be served from your watches, from mobiles and maybe even from your spectacles. News will be everywhere and always 24/7/365. No more waiting for the morning paper, you have news whenever you want it and wherever you want it and however you want it, news customized just for you.