The Powder of the Press
By: Mark Winter
If ever there were an illustration of the challenges that print media face when competing with electronic media (Internet or broadcast), it is this.
When I arrived at work this morning, a major local daily newspaper sit on the lobby counter. In big bold letters on the front page, the headline read, “Chrysler Survives.”
By the morning, when the newspapers arrived at the newsstand, this headline was already out of date. Now, when you go to the newspaper’s homepage, the main story’s headline reads “Bankruptcy looms for Chrysler as talks fail.”
And such is the problem with the printing press. It’s permanent. It can’t be changed. In the modern era, anything printed by it can become old news before it ever gets delivered to the consumer. This is the challenge facing print journalism. And the media’s evolution, as we’ve noted many times before, will require much more than simply moving their model to an online format.
Stay tuned. By the time you read this, something may have changed.
