A recent report that the Pulitzer Prizes will now be accepting submissions from Internet publication is clearly a sign of the times, but what took so long? Without question there’s no rocket science to see that dramatic decline in newspaper publication. As someone who cannot let a day go by without reading a newspaper it’s clear that newspaper readership is in a sharp decline.
What are the numbers?
Even the newspaper organizations report a decline, but it still interesting that many of the daily newspapers like USA Today, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal are printing more than 6 million copies daily. In the meantime the daily eyeball visits to their websites exceed 13 million. As a daily reader of the washingtonpost.com, newyorktimes.com, and the dallasnews.com it’s easy to get a news fix. But the trends portend badly for newspapers in the future.
Where are we headed?
With a generation of youth who rely on cell phones in lieu of wearing watches and use text messaging rather than talk to others, it seems unlikely they will ever read newspapers. At the same time news is on the decline, there is also a sharp increase on people participating in virtual worlds like Second Life. So if people live in virtual, non-real worlds….how does real news even apply? These social issues are changing dramatically by the dramatic growth of use of the Internet. It seems that we cannot really predict exactly where we are headed, but it’s sure interesting to observe these changes as they occur.