From Deseret News archives:
Newspapers suffer from wasting disease
I have been watching newspapers as you watch a cherished friend who has a slow debilitating illness. You wonder: Even if they survive, will they ever be the same? The signs are not encouraging. It's not that the media companies are speeding toward the edge of a cliff. On any given day, 51 million people buy a paper, and 124 million read one. Just for perspective, the New York Giants and New England Patriots set a Super Bowl record with an audience of 97.5 million. Profit margins are still in the high teens, and newspapers are touting their success in moving readers online.
This is not an industry that is going to go the way of carbon paper and rotary phones. It's worse than that. It's an industry with a wasting disease that will rob us of essential benefits that we have forgotten how to appreciate.
He later added, "The Internet is a wonderful place to be."
As newspaper companies adapt to the realities of consumers who can travel the world on their iPhone, I am afraid they are going to become a shell of their original purpose; a brand name for a collection of niche publications, free tabloids and assorted Web sites. The center, that gravitational force that holds the parts of a community in its orbit, will be gone.
Sure, the Internet is a wonderful place to be. But the digital newspaper shares space with those who post because they have a position to promote, a score to settle, a diet to sell or that voice in the microwave told them to. Newspapers are better than that. They are apart from that. No, they don't always get it right. But they are the only daily medium of depth that has the resources and the responsibility to try. They are the alternative to wrapping our lives in the perspectives of those who believe just as we do cheering as the Bill O'Reillys and Keith Olbermanns lob rhetorical loogies at each other from behind the battlements.
Recent comments
I, too, love newspapers. I'm from Salt Lake City. Know where I can...
mamapapaluv | March 23, 2008 at 7:20 a.m.
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so sorry to hear this terrible news..much sincer condolences to the her family.
Time for him to go. PAST time for him to go.
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