The Death Watch for the American Newspaper: Economics Doom Print. It's that Simple.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

By Mark Karlin

To those, like me, who feel comfortable reading through a print newspaper or two in the morning, start the prayer for the dead. It's over.

Whatever one thinks about the corporate mainstream media -- and BuzzFlash has been one of its fiercest progressive critics -- the newspaper has been an American institution that will be missed. But make no mistake about it, the very free market system that the corporate print media has been a shill for over the past decades doom it to extinction.

Quite simply, the economic costs of news print, production and distribution of a hand-held paper are unsustainable in an age of instant digital transmission of information, articles, photos, and more.  Except for a relatively small number of smaller niche papers (ironically primarily in rural areas where the costs are much lower), the ride will soon be over.

That doesn't mean the end of journalists.  They will reform into outlets that will transmit to the new generation of Amazon Kindle-type devices that will start to rapidly drop in price as manufacturers proliferate.  Within a couple of years, most Americans will get their real time news on devices that look like thin photo frames or the Internet.  No American media conglomerate can carry the high cost of printing and distributing a newspaper (often in which the news is up to 24 hours behind electronic transmission) for much longer.

The downward spiral is accelerating: cut staffs, reduced subscriptions, less advertising at a lower price for the ads due to reduced subscriptions.  Not to mention the recession or the shift of advertising dollars away from newspapers to the Internet.

It is not economically viable to have a newspaper delivered to your door (with all the cost associated with that act) when you can sit down at your computer and get the same information in real time with minimal costs for electronic transmission of the same data.

Nostalgic we may be for the times when we read the paper with a morning cup of coffee or on the train, but it is nostalgia that we will carry with us -- not the newspaper.  Because they are economically as obsolete as stage coaches as far as printed editions.

What concerns me is how this will further widen the digital divide in the nation.  The corporate press -- for all its failings in "framing" issues to the center right to benefit corporate interests -- produced newspapers that were accessible to the working person: cab drivers, dish washers, waitresses, cashiers, etc.  Not many of these people will be able to afford the new digital "readers" in the short term, nor do their jobs necessarily lend themselves to grabbing a peak at an etch-a-scetch looking device during breaks.

For some time to come, as newspapers fold one by one, the more well off will have access to the printed word on the Internet and on digital readers; the working class will, as is often the case, be left in the dark, except for the bleak, distorted, mcnugget news on television and the radio (with some rare exceptions).

But like it or not, that is the future we are facing.  This is no progressive-caused downfall of the corporate newspaper business -- largely owned by huge media conglomerates.  It is the economic efficiencies of new technologies that make printing and distribution of a hand-held newspaper obsolete because it is a drag on the bottom line that is unsustainable to shareholders.

But for democracy, it will be a challenge indeed as the better educated and more affluent -- at least in the short term -- acquire a stranglehold on the written word.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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