And then there was none
: On yesterday’s MediaCenter webcast called The Vanishing Newspaper, the author of a book by the same title, Philip Meyer, gave lots of illuminating stats from his study of the relation between quality and credibility on one axis and circulation and success on the other.
He showed a chart with declining newspaper readership and said that if you continue that line, the last reader recycles the last paper in 2040 — April, 2040, to be exact.
I joked that I think that’s about the time Social Security will go bust. There’ll be a lot of very hungry former reporters. (It’s hard to get a laugh on a webcast.)
Meyer also said that these charts tend to level off but he could also see it accelerating.