The retirement of the Information Grandad... the twilight is upon the newspaper

The clock runs out, the hands touch the digits I knew that would come but hoped wasn’t until later, I want my 24 hr clock to run twice as slow so I can continue to dream the dream I wanna dream. Wishful thinking, the clock hands reach the time I had set, the alarm goes off, I add the lifeline also called the snooze button, I buy an additional ten minutes… but that runs out too… I get up, hit the showers and am at the coffee table.

I look out the patio window, it’s a crisp spring morning, the early morning dew was dying and there was a pleasant smell coming through the freshly hydrated grass. As the sunlight glazed the sharp blade of grass, there was idealism about the whole thing. I walked across the living room, retrieved the newspaper and switched on CNN. The coffee was brewing, I love the early morning coffee smell, something about that caffeine spreading across the living room and violating the defenses of your nostril that’s as captivating as anything that early in the morning.

As the dog days of the economy continue to drag down any positive vibe that we seem to procreate, I was preparing myself for another bumpy news day. I was pleasantly surprised, there was an uptick in the DOW Jones and the NASDAQ, the Asian markets were amping it up and there was not a scent of domestic violence report, for one day the news was all good. How often does that happen, as I browse through the pages I get a weird feeling, there was rarely any ad on the paper, for a fleeting moment it felt great, I mean how cool was it to go pages at a time without those annoying ads. But then it didn’t take much longer to realize that this was part of a bigger issue, the ad companies are cutting into the money they expend on the print media.

The online websites and the gazillion blog and classifies sites have taken over some real chunk out of the print media armor. Advertisers no longer need to put in ads that will be viewed by a few thousand folks, they now can advertise on some of the popular sites for millions of potential customers. The shopping and ad market is right now delivered to our laptops. The print media is paying the price for it, with every new generation there is something new that is ushered in, the bullock carts were overtaken by buses and trains as a medium of transport which was in turn overtaken by your motorbikes and cars. Change is the only constant. And the decade of reckoning comes for any aging medium or product that has outlived its purpose.

The newspaper industry is at that crossroad, they are running against time, they are running against a goliath named technology that fits this generation’s denizens; they are in the final stages of becoming outdated. As I read through my newspaper, I saw an article that reported over 208 print medium – mostly newspaper – companies have shutdown since January 2008. That’s a staggering number. Unfortunately for the newspapers there is no comeback, we are in the here and now generation, we want the news in picture and audio the millisecond after it happens not the morning after. I remember the days when ‘The Hindu’ ran a late edition to print scores from the West Indies-India series, so we have a little more updated information. I remember the days when the third one day international of the India-Pakistan cricket series in Toronto would have started and we only had the late edition score from the second one international. Fascinating, of how we were waiting for that newspaper, there literally used to be a tug of war between my brother and I and who got to read the newspaper first.

I remember when I got our first color TV, my grandmother told us about the days when the radio ruled the roast, when All India Radio was the goliath until the TV came. She was mildly surprised when we got the news the day of the event. While the newspaper has been able to brush back the power of the TV and Radio it doesn’t stand a chance when it comes to online reports and blogs. In the battle with TV and radio, there was only so much that a newscast can read to you, ultimately you have to explore the paper for the details, they only reported the top stories, but there is no such luck, with a trillion bloggers at their keyboards every minute, unfortunately this time there is no way out for the print media.

What do we stand to lose and what do we stand to gain, for a start there will be the hundreds of thousands of trees that will be saved from the big old axe, there will be less trash to dump into the ocean, there will also be some bigger losses, like the investigative stories, the on field reporters, the journalists that travel everywhere to report a minute story. Try as best as we can, the bloggers cant duplicate a journalist, we react to news and deliver opinions, we still need the AP and Reuters to print something online for us to opinionate. The reality is that many newspaper companies are going bankrupt, what will happen to investigative journalism, will the newspapers go online only and still fund the reporters, what lies ahead is fascinating and intriguing.

When they stopped production of the 1 paise coin, many nostalgic folks were perturbed, the pervious generation will attest to it, but something integral, that was part of their lives will now be gone, most young kids nowadays will be shocked to learn of a 1 paise coin, that’s what will become of the newspaper and some of our generation folks who still have a soft corner for the medium, will feel the loss. Lets just hope that though the newspapers are dying that creativity, honesty and information continues to inundate us in other forms.

As I sip through my coffee and get ready to leave for work, I think for a moment whether I am holding a soon to be relic in my hands, something whose last days are fast approaching, maybe I should find a cabinet to store a few of these to show the future generation, there was this before the online medium. This was how we got the news, this was how we were informed, this print medium is the grand daddy of information distribution, this print medium taught us, educated us and made us better. Unfortunately that day is approaching faster than we all are anticipating or hoping.