Do newspapers have a future?

This is the question posed by Michael Kinsley in the latest issue of the Time magazine.

He says:

"It seems hopeless. How can the newspaper industry survive the Internet? On the one hand, newspapers are expected to supply their content free on the Web. On the other hand, their most profitable advertising --classifieds --is being lost to sites like Craigslist. And display advertising is close behind. Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports."

Being a journalist, especially one that works online, this is a pertinent question indeed. There has been a worldwide concern for a long time about how the Internet will effect the print media.

For a long time the print industry tried to brush aside the Internet tide, pretending that it will not have an impact at all. Then one by one the big media players slowly started to realise the potential of the online media boom.

Even now when we talk about online media, what we have are websites belonging to print players - some update their sites instantaneously while others prefer to upload their print version online. We still don’t have many stand alone online media outlets.

However with the explosion of blogs now, I think things the way we see news and we read news have already started to change. The Internet is now giving more alternative news to the readers, and it is giving it to them much faster, with indepth analysis and review, and with more colour than what the print media can do.

I firmly believe that the Internet will not kill off the print media but it is going to give the newspapers a close run in terms of influencing the readers.

Kinsley believes that newspapers will have to change the way they write their stories - by adding analysis and opinions in straight reporting can be a start.

He gives a clue as to how it would be in the near future:

"The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity."

Read the full article here.