Jack Shafer believes the end is nigh for newspapers. No doubt sped up by shithouse reporting. I am hearing daily about more and more older subscribers of the NZ Herald canceling. It seems now, at the bowling clubs and bridge clubs the oldies are trying to out do each other for who canceled first. There is real kudos these days is being the longest non-Herald household.
Newspaper owners may be running out of time to beat the liquidation clock if the prediction (pdf) made in January by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future proves accurate. Because the current generation of print newspaper readers aren’t being replaced, most major U.S. print dailies will be dead in five years, the report concluded. Very small newspapers might endure as dailies, as well as the large national newspapers – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today – and the local Washington Post. For other newspapers to beat the reaper, said the Annenberg report, they must downsize from daily to once- or twice-a-week publication.
