Dealing With Print's Death

It's always tough to lose a loved one, even when the death signifies the end of suffering, as it will with the death of the struggling print industry.

Whether or not you believe the harrowing headlines that foretell print's death, the signs of its downward spiral are readily evident. Take the recent shutdown of the print version of Seattle Post Intelligencer, for example. Pair that with the regularly scheduled headlines (online and, ironically, in print) about other papers filing for bankruptcy, layoffs at The New York Times, and it's clear P-I is just a first of many major newspapers to take the plunge.

We hear a lot of the same arguments where print and its death are concerned: One medium doesn't necessarily need to kill another! But I like the way it makes my fingers dirty! (No?) For some wishful thinkers, myself included, the hope has been that the Web and print can coexist happily, but sometimes the numbers just don't add up.

Who killed print (Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe again, was it?), and do you care? A poll last week on Internet Evolution, taken by over 400 respondents, suggests you do.

Answering the question "Which statement best describes your attitude" about the reports of the print industry's impending death, 42 percent of IE readers called it a "tragedy when a city doesn't have two competitive daily newspapers," and another 42 percent don't mind losing print "if we can maintain journalistic integrity on the Web." (HA! Oh, wait, you were serious...?)

With nearly 85 percent of our readers either distressed over the idea of not having competing newspapers or concerned about maintaining journalistic integrity online, it's clear that we're making this shift toward digital publishing with light footsteps.

But as we find ourselves lamenting print's death, longing for better days, wishing it had only been better prepared for the digital age, with some like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even asking for help from the government, others say there was nothing that could have been done to protect print.

In a recent blog post, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, puts it rather succinctly:

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

Further, says Shirky, to think otherwise -- to demand to hear "that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it" -- is to ignore the fact that we're living through a "revolution" and to ask to be "lied to."

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves -- the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public -- has stopped being a problem," he writes.

Are we better off casting print and its "walled-garden" approach aside completely, moving to an age of Internet-publishing-only where "competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed"?

Is it time to just accept that clinging to the idea of the costly printing press is simply absurd in the digital age?

Our readers don't seem so sure. But, according to Shirky, that doesn't much matter.

? Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution