of week 2

What did week two bring us?

[Un]timely news of the demise of certain traditional mediums.


As a newspaper man (sort of, I like to read them), I believed that newspapers, in their paper format, would eventually go.

It's difficult to forecast such things really. The demise of radio has long been predicted, but it just seems to dust itself off after each falloff, and kind of reinvent itself. Newspapers will do the same, transferring to a digital format, including one which will be off our computer screens and on a more paperlike portable screen which doesn't cause as much eye strain and mimics reading an actual paper as best it can.

I'll never prefer this mode of operations with a newspaper. At least, I doubt it. But I have to believe that kids growing up entirely in a digital/internet age, may even come to prefer it. We're all accustomed now to checking online for news, and I do it myself. Sometimes I prefer it over reading it out of a paper or magazine, but just for quick reference. But I'm accustomed to both ways and, as one might expect, just prefer the one I knew first and grew up with. Kids even now don't have to rely on the paper format; they can get whatever they want, in most instances (some online versions of papers aren't free though), right online. And I have to believe this will likely be the new way.

Though I don't believe major papers will follow suit for a long, long while, the Christian Science Monitor has recently announced that they're going entirely digital. I can understand that as it's more a nationwide publication, and not a local one, per se. So I don't think that's the first domino to fall. But it does look like it might be a sign of things to come.