As someone whose livelihood has, at times, depended on the number of people who buy and read newspapers, I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news: A media monitoring firm says that non-newspaper readers are likely to be younger, and spend more time than others at online news sites. Meanwhile, heavy newspaper readers are more likely than average to engage with traditional print news brands online.
“That current generations are growing up getting their news online for free is an indicator that print circulations are likely to continue their decline,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of media monitoring firm comScore Inc.. “But the Internet represents a significant opportunity to extend – and even improve upon – existing news brands and reach out to new consumers with living, breathing real-time content. Just because print circulations are declining does not mean there are fewer news consumers. In fact, just the opposite is true.”
The conclusions are based on some U.S. data but I suspect the general trend likely holds for Canada.
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At 71 I am not a younger reader but I also get most of my news from Blogs. I find there are some very well informed and knowledgeable people on the blogs and I can get usually get far more accurate information and from different sources. I am tired of getting personal opinion, uninformed & outright distortion of facts, personal political views, lazy, inaccurate and many times non existence research from so called and well known “Media Personalities” consisting of columnists, newscasters, pundits, Ottawa correspondents, correspondents on assignment etc. presented to me as NEWS as well as “political forums, town halls, pundits” and so on where the people, questions and answers are preordained for their political bias and slant. I feel a number of people in the media attempt to play the public as uniformed fools and suckers that can be influenced by their spin, which unfortunately in many cases is true.
You know, I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I belive firmly that given the level of technology we have today, we should have been a paperless society a long long time ago.
This isn't to say that I don't enjoy picking up a book to read quietly somewhere. In fact, I love the feel of turning a page by hand, and holding the book where I like it. However, there are many mediums where this should be the exception to the rule, not the norm.
Most print (I broadly use that term), can be stored and recalled electronically though a variety of means. And now that wireless internet abounds across this country, hard lines aren't even necessary. Also, as the other poster has said, blogs are often more informative as they offer a wider variety of oppinion and interaction, thus steepening the learning curve for anyone. Other circulations such as newspapers already take advantage of RSS subscriptions and as you have here, XML notifications for activity on items of interest.
Not only would this be an environmentally sound development, but it would further increase the distribution of knowledge and the accuracy of that knowledge.
Some points to ponder I guess.