vera has a website

if print dies, it’ll be suicide

It’s the old story of the glass half full or half empty – you can look at the same thing from different perspectives and choose to either have a positive or negative opinion about it.

When the first photographs appeared, the end of oil portraits was announced. Later came the TV and people starting digging radio’s grave. When the first CD was out, there was talk of bidding farewell to vinyl.

Some of these deaths were confirmed (who still remembers what a VHS is?) but others weren’t. The question that a lot of people are asking but that none can yet answer is: Is internet going to kill printed news?

But if you think it will, how come the newspapers survived the invention of radio and television? It’s true that paid newspapers are selling less but there’s still the phenomenon of free newspapers. Why not blame those instead?

What newspapers need to do is stop thinking about the internet as the enemy and embrace it. It doesn’t have to be one or the other and it’s not hard to have the same team of journalists writing for the newspaper and publishing that same content online. The Web is the key to their survival – I can’t stress it enough. Instead of trying to fight the enemy, you need to get in bed with it. Producing online content is the only way to keep selling newspapers.

I still read newspapers and, like me, millions still do. I think I probably always will. There was never a time in my life when I only bought the newspaper because I felt the need to be informed. No. Television has been around for a lot longer than I have. Watching the news on TV never stopped me from buying the newspaper. Reading the news online doesn’t stop me from buying it either.

Maybe I don’t *need* to buy it anymore. But need was only one of the several reasons for me to ever do it.

Unless they’re really short-sighted, everyone in newspapers knows what might kill them and what needs to be done to prevent that death. If they choose not to do it, then that will be suicide. I don’t think they want to shoot themselves (it is a business, after all). I might be wrong but, in my age and in my position, it’s a lot better to choose to think things are not so bad.