The End of Print?

“What’s black and white and completely over?”
John Stewart of “The Daily Show,” on print Newspapers.

So it may seem that the end of print newspapers as we know them is nigh. After all, who wants to pay for something in print when we can go to the web and very conveniently find the same content for free?
Well, some people in the newspaper business don’t want to give their content away for free anymore. News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch, photo above), which owns newspapers like the New York Post, among many others, is considering pulling their content from Google and cutting a deal with the Microsoft owned search engine Bing, who would then have exclusive paid rights to News Corp. content in the future. Some say this may set a precedent for other print newspapers to start charging for their web content.
I know that this might seem like a bad thing for consumers at first, but I feel like it is a very good thing for journalists and journalism. I recently saw an interview with the legendary British journalist, Sir Harold Evans, who said that he was very optimistic about the internet’s impact on modern journalism. He said that if good investigative journalists could begin to have their work and research properly funded, the internet, and it’s seemingly limitless research capabilities, would be the catalyst for a new “golden age” of journalism, instead of being the terminus of journalism and newspapers as some scholars have predicted. Of course, that’s a pretty big if, Sir Harold.
The problem is that so much of the news content on the web is free and many newspapers have lost so much money they can no longer afford to exist. News Corp. is perhaps not the best example of this phenomenon because they are a massive media conglomerate, which owns more than one piece of the mass media pie (and maybe more than one pie!) but I think you get the point. I believe that online newspapers should begin charging for content if it would mean that more newspapers could stay in business and more journalists could stay employed. I’m not certain that paying for content would help to save newspapers that are losing money due to increasing online readership, or if people who had to pay for online news would simply stop reading the news altogether, but again, it seems like a step in the right direction.
I can’t help drawing a parallel between the current financial situation of print newspapers and the situation the music industry found itself in a few years ago with the advent of free music downloads. We learned to pay for online music; surely we can learn to pay for the news too. If someone doesn’t like it they can always do what I do to get the news for free—listen to NPR!

(see Rupert Murdoch talk about the New Media @ www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQSKRWXyFw8&feature=user)