>SNIP
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>>I do believe paper newspapers will go away. Completely. Gone, fini, kaput. The information will still be there but it will be in electronic form, not hand delivered on paper. If you watch the New York Times at all -- which I mention only in passing was the ONLY major U.S. newspaper with a circulation gain last year, and that was from the national edition -- you will see that they have been shifting to the binary era for at least the last three years. It's happening whether you like it or not.
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>I've heard/read that newspapers' main problem nowadays is loss of advertising revenue, attributed mostly to internet-related factors like "Craig's list", the Google advertising model and the like. And it is a SERIOUS PROBLEM for them.
>These are things that an individual can do little about in terms of demonstrating support for the medium. Apparently our quarters/dollars are a small consideration in the profitability of newspapers. And I can say categorically that I wouldn't pay much more than I do now to let them replace advertising revenue with copy price sales.
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>When they do go away I can't see an "electronic newspaper" working out. All it will really have going for it by that time is its name. And if they don't exist already, I can see services that gather the news for you from across the universe and order/display it to your taste, with/without advertising. With sources specified (especially eliminations) by the individual too.
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>All of which, which is just as sad, leaves yet another opportunity for off-shoring of "news delivery". At least with newspapers printing had to be done locally, along with distribution.


News delivery will not be off-shored, at least not in this country. It will just arrive in a different form, from the same news organizations.

The decline in advertising revenue is indeed a serious problem. The fundamental problem is that ad revenue tracks readership practically dollar for dollar. Readership is down and so are ad dollars. And the demographics are worse still. The average American newspaper reader is a 50 year old white woman. Surely not the advertisers' target demo.

The news business will endure. We will always want to know what is going on, to one degree or another. The word "news" itself is derived from "new" -- what's new? The news will just come to us in a different form.