Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams looks into his crystal ball and predicts the End Times for the newspaper business:
I predict that the end of printed newspapers will happen in the time it takes for most people to upgrade their cell phones two more times. The iPhone, and its inevitable copycats, (let’s call them iClones) are newspaper killers. When you have a web browser in your pocket, a printed newspaper is redundant. Eventually, all cell phones will have Internet browsing built in. You might not have a web browser on your next cell phone, but the one after that will have it as a standard feature.
Most people prefer to read a printed page versus a computer screen. A cell phone screen is the worst of all. But newspapers will collapse as a business long before 100% of iPhone and iClone owners give up their printed newspaper subscriptions. I don’t know if it will take 20% of iPhone/iClone owners to cancel their subscriptions, or if it will take 60%, but whatever the number, it seems likely we will reach it. Then the printed newspaper will disappear.
Then he goes off into a lot of futurist nutterings, which I always take with a grain of salt because really, who the hell knows what will happen in the next five to ten years? We could all be reading the news off of implated microchips in our toenails.
The stuff about newspapers is on the money though. Every newspaper I know of is terrified of what the future will bring.
October 8th, 2007 at 8:52 am
And the weird thing is the timing of this pronouncement: for myself personally, I’m finding newspapers increasingly worth the trouble to buy and, more importantly, to read. It’s not just the comics pages, though, although those could stand to lose the “all-humour, nothin’-but-humour” doctrine by which those editors responsible for them select which ones get picked up or dropped.