Is Print Dead?

Recommend (0) Comments (1)

(The following is adapted from the Keynote Convocation speech I gave at the San Jose State University Journalism School graduation on Thursday, May 22, 2008.)

They called newspapers dead when radio came along in the 1930s. Then they called newspapers and radio dead when television came along in the 1950s. And now they’re calling newspapers dead again, because the internet has come along.

Hogwash.

Like grinning fools waiting to watch a hanging, too many smug pundits are too eager for the drama of our industry’s death. They’re not seeing the deeper transformation going on before their eyes.

The truth is that we are read and watched more than ever before – just in different ways. And that even means by young people, who have never been a core audience of news before – but who now, thanks to the internet, are reading us more than ever. Even though we hear so often that everyone younger than 30 has abandoned the act of reading news.

When people click on those headlines on the Google home page or The Huffington Post, you know who mostly originated those stories – real reporters did. The internet steals from TV and radio, but most of its most substantive material is ripped off from newspapers. And without us newspaper professionals generating that material, the chattering classes on cable TV and blogs would have nothing to chatter and blog about.