'Sunset' For Print In Five Years, FT Sees
Posted on 05/26/2010 9:13:00 AM PDT by abb
For years, even many of us in the online realm had countered digital prophesies of “the death of print” with cautious reservation.
But now - as newsprint costs rise, digital operations grow their importance to publishers and driving delivery trucks around the place begins to seem anachronistic - printing on paper may increasingly look like just another cost that, soon, could be removed from the balance sheet.
The Financial Times is amongst those seriously preparing to switch off printing presses, parent group Pearson’s director of global content standards Madi Solomon told me during a panel at the E-Publishing Innovation Forum in London on Tuesday…
“There’s nothing like a financial crisis to keep a newspaper afloat. They couldn’t be happier because that has elongated what they like to consider their ‘sunset’, the sunset of print.
“They’re investing a lot in their online presence. Yes, they do see the end of print. That pink broadsheet has such fond memories for so many people that I don’t think they’ll completely stop printing, but they will certainly pull back - in fact, they’re already pulling back.” There is tactical retreat from printing in certain geographies.
Solomon says the FT is committing to “less print” and says the FT sees a five-year trajectory for having exited print in substantial part. “They’re not saying that, by five years, they’ll completely stop it, but they do see that the sunset is going to be in about five years for them.”
Pearson (NYSE: PSO) is “scrambling” to service a large-scale switching from print to digital, Solomon said, especially in its core education segment, where states like California and Singapore have committed to transition education away from text books, she said.
Five years? Here’s the calendar some other publishers are betting on…
—Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has always said the title’s current print factory will be its last ever; he reckoned it would run for 20 years from its 2005 inception. “I think that might be telescoping quite dramatically now,” he said last week.
—London’s Times editor John Witherow agrees his print plant, built in 2008, will be the last: “They were supposed to last 30 or 40 years. Things are speeding up now.” He anticipates a print withdrawal in more “considerable time”.
—The Seattle Post Intelligencer, following eight years of losses, already abandoned printing its newspaper in March 2009, and instead now operates a radically slimmed-down website alone.
—It was joined by the Christian Science Monitor, which, after chronic circulation decline, dropped its print edition to publish online only one month later
—“If cheap, flexible screen technology really takes off, then I do think print’s years are numbered,” B2B publisher Incisive Media’s online commercial head Jon Bentley told the E-Publishing Innovation Forum event…
—Though Nature.com associate director Daniel Pollock said “rumours of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated” and reckoned the science journal will be printing for “a generation or two to come” - “It will shift from the majority medium to one of several minority media.”
So, what date is your diary showing for paper’s last rites… ?
ping
Save da Oit! Stop killin treez for liberal propaganda!
As the printed word disappears, so does a permanent record of history.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/Headlines/media-audit-%E2%80%98wall-st-journal%E2%80%99-readership-up-big-since-murdoch-takeover-while-%E2%80%98n-y-times%E2%80%99-stays-flat-and-%E2%80%98usa-today%E2%80%99-falls-61452-.aspx
Media Audit: ‘Wall St. Journal’ Readership Up Big Since Murdoch Takeover, While ‘N.Y. Times’ Stays Flat and ‘USA Today’ Falls
http://www.etaiwannews.com/etn/news_content.php?id=1267953&lang=eng_news&cate_img=logo_taiwan&cate_rss=TAIWAN_eng
Quality journalism ‘public good’ for democracy, says IFJ
http://www.minnpost.com/mnblogcabin/2010/05/25/18438/duets_blog_is_a_blogger_a_journalist
Duets Blog: Is a blogger a journalist?
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/05/fcc-is-digging-deep-as-its-reviews-comcast-nbc-universal-deal.html
FCC is digging deep as it reviews Comcast-NBC Universal deal
http://arabnews.com/opinion/columns/article57545.ece
Making room for a paperless world
http://www.newjerseynewsroom.com/style/newspapers-are-dying-but-theyre-not-dead-yet
Newspapers are dying, but they’re not dead yet
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/05/ellen-goodman-and-jake-shapiro-empowering-citizens-through-public-media/comment-page-1/#comment-117171
Ellen Goodman and Jake Shapiro: Empowering citizens through public media
Et Tu, Pinch. Bientot!
It is actually amazing how few major dailies have closed shop during the Great Obama Recesssion.
“As the printed word disappears, so does a permanent record of history.”
Sadly however it has become:
As the printed word disappears, so does a permanent opinion of history.
Words will still be printed just not on paper.
Liberals should be very happy, all the trees and such that don’t have to be turned into their liberal rags anymore. I have always wondered why the MSM never ever did a story on themselves for selfishly destroying the environment, using lots of nasty chemicals processing pulp into white newsprint, using inks that were dangerous (color ones still are) and then after one day having a paper product that gets tossed away and dumped in landfills.
Wonder why they’ve never done an environmental expose on themselves regarding their wasteful usage of trees. Hmmm.
'Sunset' For Print In Five Years, FT Sees
I mean printing newspapers on presses is so, 1800s. Why don’t they want to be progressive? It’s like all the politicians who think the solution to our transportation problems involved 19th century technology fixed rail systems.
Don’t you see, when THEY do those things “It’s for the Children!” Or some such.
I call it the liberal version of when Nixon said, “When the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”
Printed on what? Electronic data isn’t printed.
There are countless digital standards (proprietary programs and disc formats) plus the requirement of electricity to access (and cracked discs aren’t always recoverable but a torn book could still be at least partially read).
We’ve also seen websites “revise” the historical record (including the details of just WHICH hospital Obama was born at) when errors were noted (with no mention of the correction).
In the 1980s we heard that 50% of all films prior to 1950 no longer exist.
How many websites and blogs since 1994 have vanished without a trace?
What data is preserved will depend on the one who ran the site and whether they were able to back off their content before a provider went belly up, before they changed the page to suit their current whim,etc. It’s really more like a whipeboard on things like myspace.
Lots of problems with a society that has a vanishing (potentially) daily, weekly or monthly record of happenings in the world, locally, state wide, America wide and world wide situations and circumstances.
Then we really will be in a gullible position, and truth, and facts will disappear and it will be CHAOS!
LOOK FOR THIS TO BEGIN. AFTER THE FACT IT MIGHT/WILL BE TOO LATE.
I CAN SEE HORRILE, RESULTS AND THE COMPLETE SUBJECTATION OF SOCIETY ALL VOVER THE EARTH.
GOD HELP US IN OUR DAY, BLESS AMERICA AND ITS PEOPLE, ISRAEL, JERUSALEM, AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE, THE PERSECUTED BELIEVERS, MUSLIMS’, AND THE LOST, KEEP US FROM EVIL, IN JESUS NAME, AMEN’
About a half hour ago CNBC reported that one or two Disney employees were arrested for insider trading (trying to sell insider information to an FBI informant.)
From information via the arrest affidavit, CNBC said that, in order to show good faith, the insiders disclosed that Disney was in talks to sell the ABC network. Is the news business so bad that Disney would sell it?
Personally, I would give most of their MSM Nitwork cousins just about as
long. Falling viewership numbers and ad revenues ... both somewhere
in the range of a 20-40 percent compound rate for the past five years
... will eventually take their toll.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=184058
Bay Citizen Embraces 4 Emerging Trends Among News Startups
I believe so. A TV network is but an electronic distribution system. So to is the internet. So the question becomes why spend billions to operate and maintain a system that is today obsolete and will soon be just a memory.
That would be like expecting the EPA to deal with asbestos in car brakes, rather than asbestos in schools.
Asbestos in schools rarely turns into an exposure problem for children. Most of it was already wrapped, and abatement was pretty simple. Much of the asbestos was not friable, anyway. Asbestos in car brakes is ground into a fine mist, easily inhaled, by billions of cars, every second of every day.
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