Jun 12 2009
∞
“ My admittedly strange opinion is that we need to try harder with print. We can’t just give up on it. Inevitably there will be some loss of newspaper readership, but even that will stabilize. Not everyone wants all their news online. Do we all want to look at screens from 8am to 10pm? There’s room in the world for both online and paper. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. I guess that’s one of the things that’s always frustrating to hear, that the rise of the Internet means the death of print. There’s always this zero-sum way of painting any given industry or trend, while the reality will be more nuanced. I think newspapers that adjust a bit will survive and still do great work. But we do need to give people reasons to pay money for the physical object. The landscape right now does require that we in the print world try harder. We have to think of the things that print does best, and do those things better than ever before. We need to use the paper, maximize the physical product.
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(via buyhercandy,:unicornology:beenthinking) (via andyinabox)
This sounds like ready, fire, aim, thinking to me. As I understand it, the problem with print isn’t due to circulation or subscription pricing. The drop in advertising revenue is the big slice of the pie.
Of course, it’s pretty difficult to see how newspapers will be able to increase circulation while increasing subscription prices, so even if we discount the importance of ad revenue, I don’t see how print can achieve what needs to be done based on Eggers’ take.
