The Death of Paper- Based Communication
Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy Discussion Paper Series Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper Is Eternal By William Powers Media Critic, National Journal Shorenstein Fellow, Fall 2006 #D-39 © 2007 President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. Introduction* The condition of American journalism in the first decade of the twenty- first century can be expressed in a single unhappy word: crisis. Whether it’s a plagiarism scandal at a leading newspaper, the fall from grace of a network anchorman or a reporter behind bars, the news about the news seems to be one emergency after another. But the crisis that has the greatest potential to undermine what the craft does best is a quiet one that rarely draws the big headlines: the crisis of paper. Paper’s long career as a medium of human communication, and in particular as a purveyor of news, may be ending. Exhibit A is the newspaper industry, which is in decline largely because of competition from newer media outlets, especially on the Internet. Shrinking circulation and ad revenues, together with rising newsprint costs, are chipping away at the enormous profit margins American newspaper publishers have enjoyed for decades, throwing the medium’s future into doubt. Newspapers have been losing readers for many years, but recently the rate of the decline has accelerated. Between 2003 and 2006, U.S. dailies saw their total circulation fall by 6.3 percent for daily editions, while Sunday circulation was down 8 percent.1 The percentage of Americans who read a newspaper every day has fallen from about 70 percent in 1972 to less than 35 percent in 2006.2 “Few in the industry are now saying the downward trend can be reversed,” according to a recent report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.3 It seems entirely possible that five or ten years from now, newspapers will no longer exist, at least not in * Ben Reno-Weber, a graduate student at the John F.
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