Personally, I’ve never been a big newspaper reader. Mostly, though, its because I never wanted to spend the time reading the news, not for any dislike of newspapers themselves. I wasn’t replacing the newspaper with TV, radio or websites, I just avoid most news outlets since they tend to report primarily bad news. If I had the inclination and the time, I probably would subscribe to and read the newspaper, because I do like the format.
But like the title says, print is dead, or at least is dying.
The thing I like most about newspapers that is lost as they move to the Internet is that they are a snapshot. You can go to a library and pull up a newspaper for 40 years ago, or even just a month ago, and see exactly what was considered news on that day, exactly what was fit to print. Try doing that on CNN, or even the sites of print newspapers. You might be able to gather a collection of stories that were published on the site a month ago, maybe piece together an idea of what was newsworthy on a particular day, but not really. With news websites’ penchant for “updating” stories and new information breaks, often rewriting rather than just appending, news reported on a Monday might carry the date and time stamp of Friday when the story stopped developing.
I would absolutely love to see news websites that mimic print news papers. Big publications of stories once a day, with an archive so you can always pull up a previous issue, and then maintain a “breaking news” blog type feed that puts out mini stories and facts and things happen throughout the day, all of which will be rolled up into full stories for the next day’s issue. But I suppose, perhaps, I am in the minority about this, seeing as how every news website out there is following the CNN.com style layout of “news now” and anything that doesn’t make the front page that minute is lost to the search field, which even defaults to a web search instead of a site search.
A man can dream though…
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