A guy I trust, Mike Rohde, thinks so. He says he's using NetNewsWire 2 more and more as his source for news and reading the newspaper less. Mike clued me into Newspapers Should Really Worry in Wired. Which led to Washington City Paper. This is working for me! Drill down and see multiple opinions in a hurry. Multiple well-written articles - free. That's really what all the fuss is about. Some of these papers and magazines will go broke.
Wired's Adam Penenberg bases much of his article on 6 focus groups that the Washington Post conducted in September. They found that younger people (18-34) aren't particularly interested in reading newspapers and magazines anymore. Or, more specifically, they don't want to purchase the paper versions of newspapers or magazines. A lot of them are actually very interested in reading the content - perhaps more than ever - as long as it's free and online. They like saving the trees. They love free. Demand for the "product" - excellent writing/good information for free a click away is on the rise.
...they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.
Readership of newspapers and magazines has been dropping like a stone since 2002. Print publishers are providing themselves with unbeatable competition by putting their content online for free. They don't want to be left out of the party and, like with TV, free with advertising is winning - at least for the time being.
Newspapers - as we know them in hard copy are doomed. The value proposition just isn't there anymore. It's better than nothing, but not better than online news and magazines, RSS newsreading and, my favorite, blogging/blogreading. And there are better ways now to find jobs, rentals, cars and used stuff than the tried and true but obsolescing classifieds.
There's too much out there for free online and ultra convenient. Newspapers, magazines don't want to be left out. They make more on advertising than on subscriptions anyway. Google adsense and other kinds of things like that could work... Couldn't they? And maybe they can talk people into paying later once they are hooked? (I doubt it, but they can hope).
High quality notebook computers have played their part. I can read on the web while lying on my couch. Shit, I can even blog lying on my couch - like I'm doing right now.
It's interesting. I still read the newspaper - it gets, maybe 1 hour a week. But my online reading has soared to many hours a week. So, overall, I'm reading a lot more - online. What's suffered most in my world is paper magazine reading and TV-watching.
I used to subscribe to maybe 7 or 8 magazines. Now I'm down to 2: Vanity Fair (which was a gift) and Entertainment Weekly which started as a free 10-weeks offer that didn't get cancelled in time. I used to get digital cable and paid around $50/month, now I'm down to basic cable for $17.
Right now, the ultimate free-ride is RSS newsreading. For the most part, free of advertising, it's fabulous. But, the bean-counters are on the march, doing everything they can to insert advertising into it. If the Cluetrain guys are right, though, we may have nothing to worry about. Maybe...
A newsreader lets you read as much as you want right in the RSS feed and then only click to see the full web page if needed or desired (often to see better information such as the full article, graphics or comments). While weblogs are ad-free or only have a few adsense text ads, commercial sites are still annoyingly filled with flashing ads in many cases.
Here's hoping the good guys win.