What Will Become of the News?

Here is a thoughtful piece from CBS news. This is an excerpt -- to read the entire article click here.

Stop The Presses!
Newspapers As We Know Them May Cease To Exist ... But What Will Become Of The News Itself?

(CBS) They have been informing us about our world for centuries, but today they are an endangered species. Are newspapers really yesterday's news? Our Cover Story is reported by Jeff Greenfield:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When it comes to news about the news, no news is good news.

The Rocky Mountain News recently wrapped up operations. The Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection. The New York Times and Washington Post have announced layoffs.

And the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has been in production for more than 140 years, continues to produce news stories, but beginning this month it's doing so only online with a reduced staff. The Ann Arbor News will follow suit in July.

Are we really facing the demise of the great metropolitan daily?

It was the newspaper that became as powerful a force as any it covered, the kind of power Charles Foster Kane delighted in wielding in "Citizen Kane." It was the newspaper that brought news of crime and corruption to its readers, with an energy - and occasional manic recklessness - captured in the classic "His Girl Friday."

And it was the newspaper whose proudest moments came when it held the powerful to account - even bringing down "All The President's Men."

Hard as it for those of us whose day cannot begin without the newspaper, it is a medium that cannot survive without dramatic change. Indeed, it's not clear if it can survive as we know it at all.

But does that mean an enormous vacuum, an absence of the kind of information a democratic society needs? Or are there new sources emerging to do that work?

Longtime media watcher Michael Wolff said, "It's the end of the newspaper business right now at this point in time."

Why is Wolff predicting the imminent end of the newspaper?

Consider the facts: Just since 2000, daily newspaper circulation has dropped from 55 million to 50 million in the last two years … print ad revenue for papers dropped 28%, more than $11 billion - and that was before the recession really kicked in.

Classified ads, the most profitable of all, have migrated to the Web on sites like Craigslist.com.

And while many newspapers have a home online, readers don't pay a dime to read it.

As for paying for newsprint? Just ask the next generation, like these Columbia School of Journalism students:

"The Internet is something that we constantly have with us," said one woman. "I constantly have my laptop on."

"I read the New York Times and Washington Post online for my national news," said one man.

"Realistically, I prefer the Internet, I do, because things are updated constantly," said another woman.

For newspaper veterans like former Des Moines Register editor Geneva Overholser, now dean of the USC School of Journalism, the potential loss of the newspaper is a clear and present danger to our civic life.

"Newsrooms in newspapers have been the predominant source of original reporting about what's going on in city hall, in classrooms, about Washington, about the international scene," Overholser said. "There'll be a time when we do really need to stand up and say, 'Wait a minute!' … and it's getting pretty close."

By contrast, Wolff is highly optimistic about the future, Just look around, he says:

"It is potentially an incredibly good time," Wolff said. "We have a much bigger audience than we've ever had before. We can do it faster, we can do it better, we can even do it prettier than before."

Wolff is putting his energies behind his ideas - he founded the Web site newser.com. But the site itself illustrates the uncertain nature of the future. Just about everything it offers is not his but content aggregated, as they say, from existing newspapers …¬the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post.

If these newspapers went away, what would he aggregate?