smokehard

Hi.  My name is Karl and I’m a newspaper-holic.  I love my newspaper.  I love it for the crossword I can do each and every day on my way to (and sometimes from) work.  I read it from cover to cover through the course of the day and find I’m better informed for it.  I love folding it into squares exposing just a few inches of column and then flipping it with one hand to expose the other side.  I don’t subscribe.  I could subscirbe, and have thought of subscribing, as I would save a significant amount of money over the 1,300 won I currently pay.  But, the truth is that I’ve grown sentimental over the three years I’ve been living in my neighborhood.  Each day I walk to the same vendor in the subway.  She’s a middle-aged woman with curly black hair sitting snugly insider her silver kiosk watching the travelers at one of the busiest transfer points in all of Seoul.  She recognizes me without any trouble and always giggles to herself as I buy the paper.  Somedays I forget to stop at the bank to withdraw money, yet she has never refused me a paper.  “Pay for it tomorrow,” she’ll smile and say. So, it’s always with a sense of dread when I read about the current decline of the newspaper.

David Warsh, author of Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, operates a blog covering developments in economics and covers this exact topic in his most recent post.  The good news?  The newspaper might shrink, but he thinks it’s not going anywhere.

Will newspapers survive their current depression? Of course they will. They are, it seems to me, nearly a sure bet. They’ll be sharper, shorter, more concise. They’ll be more clear in their own minds than they are today about the audience they seek to reach, more confident than they are today about their place in the scheme of things. They’ll be around far into the future to organize the public discussion of crises like the current one.

Personally, I am waiting on Samsung to continue their developments of their “electronic paper.”  As this gets better and better (and cheaper and cheaper) I think they’ll eventually begin to use this for certain pages of the paper.  Advertisers won’t have to buy a static adspace.  Instead, they will pay based on the number of seconds that their advertisement appears.  And when that time expires, on will flash another advert.  Newspapers will be able to cut their advert rates significantly and at the same time attract a lot more advertisers.  There are a lot of variables to consider for sure.  (See: added cost, being unable to retrieve the electronic paper, waste issues, etc.)  But, with the right motivation (i.e. profits) I’m sure solutions can be found.