The Death of the Newspaper The Rise of the Blog

The New Yorker has a very good article titled The News Business: Out of Print.

This article has some very interesting, but not new, observations about the death of the newspaper. An interesting statistic is that only 18% of individuals 18-34 claim to look at a newspaper on a daily basis. If the young are not reading the newspaper, it is only a matter of time before they cannot afford to continue publishing.

I think it is obvious that newspapers are being replaced by the internet. However, with the wealth of information on the internet, who filters this data for us?

You filter the information me. I filter the information for you.

With newspapers there is a small group of editors who determine what you read. With the internet your friends, bloggers, and other internet acquaintances determine what you read. No individual can read everything on the internet. Instead everyone takes 4-5 sites on average and shares the interesting news with others. This leads to many levels of filtering, possibly before you even read the news.

For example: You found this story here at holdnothingback.com. I found the story at slashdot.org. Slashdot found the story from newyorker.com. Who got their story from several studies. Who got their data from a vast amount of information. Therefore your reading this story is after 5 levels of filtering.

Is the way this filtering is occurring today sustainable? Probably not. I would be surprised if this blog still exists in 5 year. So what is going to happen?

My guess is the local newspaper companies will stick around, but the way the news is delivered will change. I see the newspaper companies downsizing their staffs to a few good reporters to drum news up on a slow news day, while the companies will also allow you to submit your own articles and pay you for them. Then ALL of the news would be published to the site, then rated by the users to determine where it appears or possibly if it is even dropped from the site.

You are starting to see this with CNN and their iReports where an individual sends in a news article and then CNN will post it to their website and actually air it on TV. I just see this concept expanding over the next 10 to 15 years.