The Golden Age of Newspapers

The media loves nothing better than stories about itself, so there is much handwringing in the media about the drop in newspaper circulation. I predicted this in 1994 at a meeting of newspaper folk who came to Blacksburg to hear about the newfangled Blacksburg Electronic Village thing.
What I told them then has not changed--newspapers have a golden future ahead of them if they would only stop thinking their job is to print the news on paper and toss those clumps of paper in people's driveways.
What papers have is an organization designed to edit and filter the news, and that is what is valuable, not the fact that they have a big machine designed to spread ink onto dead trees; the printing press is a byproduct of the news process, not the news process itself. But newspapers have trouble seeing that.
I talked to a newspaper person recently who asked, "How do we get young people to read the paper?" The short answer is, "You can't." They expect to get their news online, and so newspapers have to abandon paper and move to a new model of news distribution, using the Internet. And the paper has to do more than just stick articles designed for paper on the Web.
Why is it the golden age of newspapers? Because in a world awash in information, most of it suspect, an organization that does a good job of telling what the most important stuff is has nothing but opportunities ahead of it. But newspapers have to let go of paper, and dropping the word "paper" from their name would be a start.
By Andrew Cohill, Design Nine