Please, can we just stop with all the suggestions to the fast fading newspaper business to save itself through an emphasis on Internet revenue? It hasn’t happened; won’t happen.  Traditional newspapers are doomed.  Business and industrial death and rebirth are the norm in economic revolutions, from the industrial one to today’s information age.  Newspapers’ demise will be followed by television networks collapsing, just as TV undid the once hugely popular radio networks.  Sooner than we imagine, all mass communication will be digital and on demand.  In terms of news coverage, former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges gives us in the digital new media sector some sobering issues to consider.

When the traditional news organizations go belly up we will lose a vast well of expertise and information. Our democracy will suffer a body blow. Not that many will notice. The average time a reader of The New York Times spends with the printed paper is about 45 minutes. The average time a viewer spends on The New York Times Web site is about seven minutes. There is a difference between browsing and reading. And the Web is built for browsing rather than for reading. When there is a long piece on the Internet, most of us have to print it out to get through it.

To Hedges new media “is not a form of progress” for news because, well, it isn’t.  Not yet.  We enjoy great promise from operations such as ProPublica, ConsortiumNews, Slate, and The Huffington Post, to name a few.  And Google news is quite the useful tool.  However, the Internet and new media overall lack a unique business model, and fitfully use the outmoded publishing and broadcasting advertising model.

As more content is digitalized, a fee-based model will emerge.  Likewise, Hedges’ remark about needing to print long Internet articles will cease to be an issue as e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle display and Sony’s Reader become common.  In time, the reader displays will be replaced by various size CPU’s that make all media viewable or playable on one screen or set of speakers.  Again, all content will likely be pay-per-view or use.  Or perhaps we can return to the old ways of not-for-profit news, funded by content providers’ entertainment and sports divisions.  Either way, a path should emerge for some responsible digital news organizations to fill the void.

While reading a good newspaper has always come at a price, the true loss will be free broadcast content. What a short but glorious age it was – the whole world available to anyone who could afford a radio, TV, plus the electric power.  With Wi-Fi “hot spots” continually expanding, perhaps our digital age can mimic some of that great concept.

A former national and international print and broadcast journalist, Bill Bartman is now a consultant to media, new media, telecommunications, and information technology. He operates from Pittsburgh, PA with an office in Washington, DC.

Article Tags: broadcasting | Chris Hedges | ConsortiumNews | digitalized content | Internet revenue | New York Times | news coverage | newspapers | ProPublica | radio networks | Slate | television | The Huffington Post | Wi-Fi hot spots

Filed under: Digital archives, Networks, News article, TV, Technology