Media consumption is moving to digital at rapid rate. Based on 10 years of studies by the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for the Digital Future, the latest publication by the center predicts that printed newspapers will virtually disappear in five years.
“Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest,” said Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center. The research concludes that it is likely that only four major daily newspapers will continue in print form: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. At the other extreme, local weekly newspapers may still survive.
“The impending death of the American print newspaper continues to raise many questions,” Cole said. “Will media organizations survive and thrive when they move exclusively to online availability? How will the changing delivery of content affect the quality and depth of journalism?”
RBR-TVBR observation: What will we wrap fish in?
This prediction may be overly aggressive in its time frame, but the trend is pretty obviously correct. Printing news on paper and delivering it to people’s driveways via trucks, cars and bicycles is slow, expensive and going away. Some newspapers are handling the transition to online news better than others, so quite a few more are simply going to die in the coming years.
