Launch of Newspaper Extinction Timeline for every country in the world

Wendy makes the point exactly…the print version is fine for everyone else, but then she hasn’t done it in five years. As that notion expands and the under 35′s and 40′s age, since they’ve already mostly abandoned print there will be no one below them to come up and revive it. As the numbers decline, print becomes too inefficient to continue. The chart seems quite defensible.

Fascinating research – Wendy makes a valid point about the desire to have a paper to hold/touch. I think that the death of the newspapers will go hand in hand with the up-take of e-readers and tablets.
Would we have envisaged the end of newsprint before the iPad came out? I doubt it, because there was no mass-market, exciting tablet out there.

I think one thing that we will miss with the demise of newspapers is that people’s willingness to pay more for something physical and tangible allows newspapers to provide more investigative reporting and the like than most online sources offer. I hope that that doesn’t disappear. I suspect that it won’t; rather, I think that some papers, instead of going extinct, will morph into weekly newsmagazines, maybe like Time or Newsweek, but with a more local and investigative focus.

@Sakari Kestinen: your points are very well taken.
Let me counter with this:
By 2020, perhaps we’ll have digital cork boards.
You would “snip” an add or an article by “grabbing” it with your fingers and “throwing” it off your “e-paper” and onto the “e-cork board” on your wall. Said cork board could follow you wherever you go in a sort of “virtual drop-box” cloud.

You should consider approaching this issue with a systems dynamics framework, to help you consider the interlocking cause/effect relationships between the variables you identified in your chart, as well as the factors the other commenters have identified.
My own take: Even though there will remain a core of readers in every market who tend to prefer paper over screens, the exodus of advertisers to digital as well as the reduced economies of scale will kill off most newspapers (and many magazines) in the U.S. in the next five years. It doesn’t matter if people still like to read paper — will they be willing to pay the full cost of having it printed, when it’s no longer supported by advertising and younger readers?

Ross,
You’re a know-nothing ass just trying to gin up a little traffic for your failing site. Congrats, you got one day’s worth with this ridiculous word salad.
Now back to online obscurity for you.
Newspapers will be around a lot longer than this site.

I expect newspapers to be around much longer than this graph expects. There are 2 important considerations: 1) Newspapers will be around as a niche for a really long time 2) There will be far fewer players in the industry, with a bigger piece of a smaller pie going to the winner…
It is more likely the newspaper goes the way of the record (a niche market) than the VHS/Cassette.
Newspapers are still an experiential medium that has advantages over digital. Digital will improve, but there will be a sizable print media niche beyond the dates in this prediction.

Thanks for all your comments!
I don’t think there’s a lot to add to what’s been said, so just a couple of points:
The cost dynamics of printing newspapers ‘in their current form’ and funding them from advertising and cover price require a certain scale. When the cost/ revenue equation doesn’t add up, production ceases, even if quite a few people would still have been happy to buy them.
Don’t look at the iPads and laptops of today for what interfaces will look like soon. By the end of the decade an iPad equivalent will be given away for free (with a few strings attached). By then digital paper will be available which makes tablet media of today look like a CRT TV. Extendable out to current newspaper size, far better information interfaces, all of the qualities of newspaper (except you can’t use it for kitty-litter), and all of of the advantages of digital too.

Great work Ross. I think you’ve captured the issues really well.
In relation to the cultural issues, I suspect social norms will change quite quickly (as you suggest). Whilst I still enjoy reading a newspaper on the weekend, I’m increasingly using my iPad for rich content, and suspect that before too long.
The other interesting issue, which hasn’t been covered (directly) so far, is the sentimentality attached to newsprint. (I love comments from the trolls above. They add no value, but they are hilarious). I enjoyed my time as a print journalist, and as an avid reader, but it’s the content, not the way it’s delivered, that I’m passionate about. I’m sure Murdoch won’t be too sentimental when print is losing money.
Again, great work Ross.

So how do you envision the future of journalism? How can good, authentic, quality journalism survive if no one is willing to pay for it?
Somehow people think news online is ‘free’, but everything comes at a price attached somewhere. Personalized news-on-paper means someone (probably Google)using personal information on my behaviour, history and interests and feeding me items that might somehow encourage me to spend (more) money on things I don’t need.
I’d rather pay a few bucks extra a month to read things in a newspaper, just to leave a door open for serendipity. I prefer stumbling over an interesting article to being spoonfed the same newsitem on a thousand different websites.

It is more polluting to create a tablet PC than to make a newspaper. I come from Finland which a few years ago at least was the worlds 4th largest paper producer. The cutting down of trees is done in a sustainable way as to ensure that people that make money on selling lumber can do so indefinitely without endangering their long term profits.
Personally I don’t see how increasing wealth inequalities and Government censorship can contribute to the proliferation of electronic newspapers. Change will come, but it will take time. Look how Obama was punished for reforming too quickly, a student of Roman history could draw parallels to Caesars assassination in the senate.

Ross, there is one thing you have overlooked entirely. Please listen to me
carefully here, because nobody is saying what I am about to say.
It’s this: Ross, WHAT IF, what if reading off screens — what Marvin
Minksy at MIT calls “screen-reading” and what I call “screening” — is
vastly inferior, in terms of brain chemistry and neuroscience, to
reading text on paper surfaces? WHAT IF, what if reading on paper
surfaces is real reading and reading off screens is faux-reading? WHAT
IF, what if reading on paper surfaces — a book, a newspaper, a
magazine — is vastly superior to “screening” off screens –
computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys, nooks, Crannies, you name it!
– in terms of information processing, information retention,
information analysis and, perhaps most importantly, Ross, critical
thinking skills?
This is my hunch, and WHAT IF, what if I am right? I might be wrong,
too. Maybe reading on paper and screening off screens is the same. But
what if my hunch, backed up by personal anecdotal experiences and the
experiences of several top experts in the field, from Anne Mangen in
Norway to Maryanne Wolf at Tufts and Gary Small at UCLA, what if my
hunch is later proven to be true by concerted neuroscience research
using (f)MRI and PET brain scan studies that just might indicate that
different regions of the brain light up when we read on paper compared
to when we “screen” off screens, and that these differences show that
reading on paper is superior to screen-reading for the four items
noted above: processing, retention, analysis and critical thinking?

Some quick (and belated) responses to some of the great comments – thanks for joining in.
Robet: yes absolutely – one of the reasons I stopped buying newspapers years ago was that I couldn’t stand the waste, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Filip: yes digital devices are wasteful too, though we don’t always feel that way. The factors mentioned don’t all necessarily support faster newspaper extinction – some mean that it will be slower in some countries. Greater wealth disparities mean that lower income (and often rural) demographic segments may have newspapers longer than affluent and urban groups.
Dan: you’ve probably got enough attention already though I’ll try to do a blog post about this soon.
Sam: there are no easy answers on the future of journalism, but I fundamentally believe that the skills of journalists are more relevant than almost any others today, and journalists have a bright future, though not necessarily under that name. We are still working out the business models.
Philip: fair cop. As I’ll go into in another post soon, I’m not treating this as an effort to be right or wrong – that’s not the point. If people think in a little more focused way as a result of this, it will have served its purpose.

I hope
that extinction timelime, will never occur. Read and flip trough a book made of paper is a unique sensation. Now recycling and reforestetion processes, pay more attention to paper problem…
Surely use of paper will decrease in time, but don’t forget that technology isn’t completely green, and has more cost in terms of productivity and pollutions.
I don’t think that extinction will be inevitable…

Ross,
Good point about defining the extinction as just becoming obsolete.
It’ll still be around, but without adapting to rapidly changing media, it’ll just be useless.
TV news has done an alright job of curbing their decline in revenue by integrating digital media. I believe that newspaper still has to figure out a way to do so without turning their numbers upside down.
What I am more worried about, along the lines of Rupert’s comment, is that as traditional media deflates, the public conscious attributes the fourth estate’s creative information delivery to diminish as well.
The carefree, casual way news is disseminated on blogs and sites depicts a lack of focus and discipline by some journalists as of late.
This is our choice, however. We now can command the content. We can command the reputation and value from it as well.
-Andrew

I think that the newspaper never dissapeard! Many people said that the newspaper dissapeard, but it didn´t!I believe it will lessen the usage of new papers but not to extinct.TV didn’t kill radio, so my opinion is that newspaper never dissapeard.

It´s an very interesting blog, but I think no one can say, what will happen in the future. On top of that, old people, aren´t able to work with an iPad or something like that. The prefer the normal newspaper.
So, you can´t say, what will happen in the next years.
CG

Dear Ross,
I think you are right with your oppinion that the newspaper will disappear but i think not as soon as you said. I belive that the internet or the whole tecnical side take over all the newspaper But it will really take quite some time because the newspapers are en important source for the society which means that it will be hard to extinct. It takes time.

Dear Ross,
I discussed your blog with my pupils in an English lesson lately.
Before we examined the issue in detail the majority didn’t agree with your extinction timeline. After we had created a list of facts and background information though, some changed their opinion and most of my pupils actually believe newspapers are going to disappear in their current form; mostly because they find the arguments against newspapers more convincing in the long run (financial reasons f.ex.)-

The newly issued thirteenth JIM study by the Pedagogical Media Research Centre Southwest in Germany revealed that in 2010, “from the young people’s perspective, the most important media activities are listening to music and using the Internet. However, there also remain traditional media, e.g. television and radio, being an integral part of the teenagers’ media world and demonstrating a stable reach. Further, young people read books or newspapers regularly. Online offerings of newspapers are increasingly finding their way to young users.”

I encouraged them to comment on your blog because I find it really interesting to hear their opinion as they are supposed to be the next ‘newspaper generation’, or ‘generation Internet’ – in between tradition and vast digital development.
VS, teacher from Germany

hi Ross,
i like your blog, too. But i think not every newspaper will disappear in 20 years. I think some newspapers will exist, because some old people won´t have a computer or a televison and they read the newspaper.
johannes

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Ross,
Good point about defining the extinction as just becoming obsolete.
It’ll still be around, but without adapting to rapidly changing media, it’ll just be useless.
TV
news has done an alright job of curbing their decline in revenue by
integrating digital media. I believe that newspaper still has to figure
out a way to do so without turning their numbers upside down.
What I
am more worried about, along the lines of Rupert’s comment, is that as
traditional media deflates, the public conscious attributes the fourth
estate’s creative information delivery to diminish as well.
The
carefree, casual way news is disseminated on blogs and sites depicts a
lack of focus and discipline by some journalists as of late.
This is our choice, however. We now can command the content. We can command the reputation and value from it as well.
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It´s an very interesting blog, but I think no one can say, what will happen in the future. On top of that, old people, aren´t able to work with an iPad or something like that. The prefer the normal newspaper.

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