Bye Bye Newspaper

One of the things that fascinates me about this time is the demise of old school media. Mainly because of the fact that our kids are growing up with a radically different view of news and media than me.

It’s not (very) obvious right now (you can still buy Time Magazine at a news-stand), but like a sub-prime mortgage crisis it will hit all of a sudden when there are no advertisers left to pay for any of the printing of magazines.

• Since 1994—and the release of the commercial web browser—newspaper audience penetration has fallen a third, from 23% to 16%. In that time, circulation fell 14% (59 million to 50 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America) while population rose 20%.
• Since 1994, newspaper print advertising revenue fell on an inflation-adjusted basis by 10% (from $34,109 million in 1994 dollars to $42,209 million in 2007 dollars, says NAA).
• Since 1994, the number of newspapers in America fell from 1,548 to 1,422, according to NAA.

You can read more in one of my must read blogs Buzzmachine by Jeff Jarvis

The way our kids get their news and how they relate to media is one of the biggest cultural influences on them, so it is vital to understand HOW they see the world around them… because it is DIFFERENT to you and me.

It will be like talking about the crackle of a needle on a vinyl record during a message to kids to talk about the evening news soon (The median age of network evening news viewers is 61 in 2008, according to Magna Global USA.).

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P.S. People will still want news in the future… its just that no one making the decisions at Fox News/NY Times/Time Warner is 9 years old. The way we get it will change and a bunch of big business will crash and burn.

P.P.S. There were A LOT of horse shoe makers in the 1920s… Did we give them big loans to continue making horseshoes while Henry Ford was cranking out some new fangled cars? claritin purchase