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New York Times CEO Mark Thompson says he expects the end of the physical newspaper in 20 years:
The New York Times was founded in 1851, but it would surprise outgoing CEO Mark Thompson if the physical paper made it to 2040.
"I believe the Times will definitely be printed for another 10 years and quite possibly another 15 years — maybe even slightly more than that," Thompson told CNBC's A View from the Top. "I would be very surprised if it's printed in 20 years' time."
More than 900,000 people subscribe to the print version of the newspaper, said Thompson. At its current subscriber levels, the paper could be printed seven days a week at a profit without a single advertisement, he said.
But as readers become more accustomed to reading the Times on smartphones, tablets and computers each year, a printed paper is clearly a dying form. The New York Times Company reported last quarter that total digital revenue exceeded print revenue for the first time ever. Print advertising fell more than 50% year over year from last quarter, driven by both secular declines and the pandemic. Thompson told CNBC he doubts that advertising will ever come back.
"I'm skeptical about whether it will recover to where it was during 2019 levels," Thompson said. "It was already in year-over-year decline for many years. I think that decline is probably inexorable."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday August 11 2020, @10:52PM (16 children)
I'm in my 40's.
I've never bought a newspaper in my life.
I'm honestly surprised we still bother to print them, even if they are free, full of ads, and given away at commuter stations (like the London Metro paper).
Honestly - what a waste of paper and energy. Print a thing on paper in full colour, distribute tons of them around the country, they last precisely 24 hours, then they're "recycled" at huge expense of more energy and a small percentage of that put back into the production of more newspaper (because it's such low quality paper to begin with anyway).
The only one I see are the local-council papers which are put through my door against my will. They've been steadily shrinking and shrinking over the years and the last one I got was barely more than a leaflet. Nobody uses the personal ads, the classified section, nobody cares about the old granny down the road who had her garden gnome stolen, etc.
If every newspaper on the planet disappeared tomorrow, we'd have a more informed populous, and a lot more paper and a lot less waste.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:00PM (3 children)
Gnome lives matter, you RACIST!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:22AM (2 children)
You should stop being a despicable bastard then maybe your kids would call more.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:37AM
I wish they would all move out, so they have a reason to call. Better they call, than stand in front of my refrigerator with the door hanging open. 'Course, that's probably politically incorrect, seeing as they are millenials . . .
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:28PM
You should stop being a despicable bastard or you will never have kids.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:01PM (7 children)
If you hadn't bought a newspaper 20 years ago, I would place you as ignorant and self-centered. Lots of people like you in your age group. Not taking an interest in the politics that go on around you. And now you reap the fruits of your ignorance. Hope you enjoy your lockdowns.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:17PM (2 children)
20 years ago. For the math-challenged among us, that was the year 2000. 20 years ago, I didn't buy very many newspapers, either. I mean, it was very rare for me to pick one up - maybe a headline caught my eye. There was news on the radio, news on television, and, we were experiencing that relatively new internet thing. True, the internet has evolved quite a lot in twenty years, but the major news sources were on the web back then. You overstate your case, as if 20 years ago was 1970, or even 1940. Remember the advent of CNN? I don't recall ever seeing a newspaper published by CNN. Not even a magazine! They've always been television and internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:41PM (1 child)
Back when CNN was still a news organization, they never covered state and local news, for example. For that, and learning about local events (remember those?), you would pick up a copy of the paper. In those days, Craigslist didn't exist yet, so that's how you found jobs and junk for sale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:06AM
Horseshit. Twenty years ago we all used the Tradin' Post to find junk for sale. Classifieds have been dead since the 80s.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Wednesday August 12 2020, @07:48AM (2 children)
Because someone reading a trash tabloid opinion piece in The Sun or The Daily Mail is going to be better informed than someone who actually sat, looked up people's history, politician's declarations of interest, used resources from all over the world from their university Internet account and broadband connection (we were WAY ahead of most families), contacted and discussed politics in open forums back when IRC was mature and not filled with bots, spam and porn, followed international news from first-party accounts and foreign news agencies, etc.?
Yeah, okay. What an idiot I must be.
I graduated in 2000, by the way, which is why I chose that date. On a CS course from the leading London university, that I mostly got content and submitted coursework to via my home Internet connection, which was fast enough to run 4 PCs and had evolved since my schools days from modem to broadband. I literally RAN sites of my own where such things were discussed, not to mention having the antiquated-by-then Usenet and IRC forums. You know 9/11 happened in 2001, right? I don't know about you but I caught wind of it on a TV that happened to be interrupted with live footage, then caught up very quickly with online video, and spent three days doing nothing but talking to Americans about it, researching who the attackers were, etc. to the point that I had news-fatigue where every website I went on (including the predecessor of this site) was running better and more accurate and up-to-date and in-depth analysis of it than the news channels were, who were just repeating the same soundbites and reshowing the same footage.
I watched all the American channels, from the other side of the Atlantic, as well as local coverage, and even that of the Middle Eastern states. I read articles from countries all over the world, I read people talk of their own experience and dedicate articles to their family's memories after becoming victim to the attacks. I read the concerns of those in the Middle East of massive over-retaliation against a splinter terrorist group, which is exactly what happened. I read up on the history of the Taliban, of Bin Laden, of weapons deals with the Middle East, religious differences, guerrilla funding by first-world nations, etc.
You seem to think it was the dark ages. I'd actually argue that if you're getting your news from papers (even the BBC News website is often DAYS behind on stories) that you're out-of-touch, deliberately picking a biased-towards-your-view cut-out of the world, and are relying on other people to cherry-pick your stories for you with little to no regard to what's actually happening in the world, getting a rounded view, or putting in any effort at all, whatsoever. And not in a "MSM sucks!?!?!" Trump-ish kind of way, but just in a "Are you deliberately seeking the full picture, or did you just believe the editor who is as far right/left as you want them to be?"
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday August 12 2020, @01:31PM
In the long ago before time when Google was a bouncing baby search engine, they had a section called "News." They discontinued it, though, probably because as you scanned down the headlines from New York to South Carolina to LA to Seattle they were all the same, and obviously copied & pasted from the same AP Wire feed.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Thursday August 13 2020, @12:55AM
In the early 2000s I too mostly got my national news through the internet but I will say that one thing I miss is buying a local paper from the machine outside my favorite restaurant, ordering my usual, and spending a nice quiet lunch reading the newspaper and then leaving it for anyone else who wanted it. At my favorite coffee shop, the paper was put out and customers would share it -- some small talk like would ensue -- "are you finished with that section" and stuff like that.
Over time the local paper got thinner and then even the pages got physically smaller -- it got to the point where there wasn't enough in it to last a whole lunch time and what was there, was just AP reprints of headlines I'd already seen on my computer. Local news became close to nothing so eventually I just went to squinting at a phone.
There were some nice things about a real newspaper though and it is sad in a way that those days are gone. The writing was less ideological too. That's also gone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @11:02AM
20 years ago we had this new fangled Internet. I remember using things like Yahoo! News - cutting edge. I wanted to buy subscription to local newspaper. They were ahead of times and they actually provided subscription with a caveat - you also HAD TO get the print. And subscription from local news was like $30/mo, like regular. But if you were out of local delivery area, it became $5/mo... Needless to say, they never got my business. Today they are in trouble, still trying to peddle printed subscription though for last few months they have "digital only" for $4/week. But today I just subscribe to NYT for $5/month instead.
So yes, I'm also 40 years old and the only thing paper I ever subscribed to was a monthly magazine. Even that today would only be good as a PDF instead. And with PDF, I can annotate and write all over it without screwing up the original version. Even flyers I only look at the PDF version or the store app on my phone for deals. Heck, even my local library has paperless access to current newspapers as ePub download. Paper news is out for almost everything.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday August 11 2020, @11:20PM
Use them to weave paper straw baskets [youtube.com].
Or to make moonshine [youtube.com].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday August 12 2020, @12:22AM
Newspapers are reasonably priced kindling. They're also good for training dogs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @05:42PM (1 child)
Yes, because reducing your number of information sources is always best for ensuring you are receiving truthful information!
Oh, and while my newspaper does still print a paper copy they also produce a lovely PDF file (or only html on their website, but I prefer using an offline reader).
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday August 13 2020, @07:42AM
And it's still *curated* news.
Someone's entire job is to write those articles, aim them at you, and convince you of a certain narrative one way or the other. They're literally paid to get into your mindset, even if they don't actually believe that, and maybe even to change your mindset. That holds no interest for me. That's not news. That's propaganda. Maybe on the part of a Maxwell-owned corporation, rather than a corrupt state, but it's still curated.
"Train crash in Scotland" is news. I can then research the crash. The cause. Has there been underfunding. What was the *full* statement of the guy interviewed. What's curiously missing from his statement? Who was in charge of maintenance? Was that company properly investing in the infrastructure? Was this foreseeable? Is this a common occurrence on that rail line, track, area, company?
Now, that's an exaggeration, but if I cared about the news that's what I do. As I say above, I spent 3 days online after 9/11 just working out what happened. Not in some conspiracy-theory-nut manner, but I just wanted to know who this ME group were that I hadn't really heard much of, who was this guy sending videos from a cave (in the early days, not so much!), etc. That the US had - yet again - funded a guerrilla movement against a guerrilla movement that it had previously funded and who turned on them, and so on.
The headlines hold no interest for me. The sterile, factual news is the seed. Beyond that I can trail off into the depths of a link tree that ends up in actual new, useful, confirmed, factual knowledge for myself that makes clear the parts of the story that don't make sense, or are glossed over.
It's like studying - reading the dry facts that someone cherry-picked for you and memorising them isn't education. It's memorisation. But re-deriving those facts from first principles, researching them, finding their history and origins and alternatives, and studying the area and the aims and achievements of that area? That's so much more rewarding and worthwhile.
Meanwhile the tabloids are running weeks of celebrity sex gossip, and footballer's wives, and trying to influence my vote. I have no interest in that. When was the last time you saw a newspaper with a "The Taliban" section (or similar) where they explain the deep history of their origins, predecessors, etc. evolving over time, almost like a Wikipedia but written for people to understand and for the newspaper to "link to" if you want to know more? Almost never. The BBC, for instance, often have a nice one-page summary of such things that they link to on every related story, but it never goes anywhere near deep enough, and it's written by the same journalists who wrote the previous articles.
Where's the knowledgebase? The deep background digging? The informative sidelines? The mass-web of links between all the major news items that explain things they'd never have time or column inches to explain? That's the real news.
Even online, curated news isn't really my thing. I don't care much for it, but I can sometimes pull facts from it as a seed. When I follow the Trump stuff, I don't care what's happening on Fox or CNN, or in the papers. There's far more interesting stuff just lurking on the periphery that's either going to come out, be buried, or explode. That's where my news lies.
The BBC, though I think they were pioneers in TV news, online news, and still lead the way in terms of "style" even if they are still becoming quite one-sided, they don't go far enough for me, and papers go even less far. And yet they are DAYS behind stuff that I poke around in, some of it never making the mainstream at all. And, like I say, I'm far from a conspiracy theory nut - probably because of this fact-checking stuff.
But newspapers? Newspapers are written purely to sell. They hire people to write what you want to hear, and you buy the paper that most closely matches your expectations (i.e. rallies against your rivals and cheers on your friends). And they're between 4 and 24 hours out of date at any one time. The only interest in that is the raw fact of the headline. And I can get that better from many other sources. Hell, sometimes the Internet in general beats the newspapers to a headline by days, let alone places on it that are specialised in one particular subject.
Newspapers are for the general news-ignorant populous to buy their favourite narrative for the day. They take one side and stick to it for 30, 40, 50 years. And, sorry, but for nearly 75% of the available newspapers, something like 50% of their content is puerile trash. How can you take a paper seriously when one minute it's telling you who to vote for and next it's telling you which footballer slept with a prostitute and claims both are "in the public interest", while their editors and funders are wrapped in scandal on a constant basis that never comes to light? We had newspapers in the UK that were "shutdown" for doing things like hacking into a dead girl's voicemail and deleting messages to free up her mailbox because THEY wanted to be first with the scoop if someone left a message on her phone, and then taken to court by dozens of celebrities that they'd been doing that too for years. The next week, the same owners started the same paper with a different name. These people aren't reporting facts to you, or want you to be aware. These people want your money, in any way possible, even if it involves sick acts like hacking into and tampering with the phone of a girl suspected dead, deleting voicemails from her friends and parents to achieve that.
I take my news from reliable sources, with unreliable ones being used purely as a trigger to start reliable research. I will happily, actively, and deliberately exclude such out-of-date and biased "sources" as those, except in the most basic starting points, in the same way that you could accuse the local university researcher of "reducing the number of information sources" because he won't listen to the drunk crackpot on your apartment landing who keeps talking about UFO's, when he's trying to research deep quantum physics. Absolutely I'll exclude them. That's what you do. You determine reliability, and remove the cruft to get to the facts, story or real narrative. I don't have to listen to every drunk crackpot's ramblings about everything, written in their daily biased propaganda sheets, in order to be well-informed, properly-informed, unbiased, and extensive in my knowledge of those subjects I'm interested in.
Sorry, but if you think the static daily newspapers are adding much to the background of the over-arching happenings of the world, then you're living in 1910. They're a well-funded propaganda vehicle, often driven by the same small handful of millionaires for decades, there to make money. I don't like news sources that are there to make money. Unless 100% of that money is going back to more journalism and research.