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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: 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.