The Independent asked a bunch of media machers about the future of newspapers and not much came out of it but these rather opposing viewpoints:
Gets it: Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror and reality-TV star:
Every newspaper has a great future online. End of story. Within five years every newspaper will be free and they’ll all be online. And if they’re not, they should be. There will still be a presence in print but that will be for older readers and you will find that anybody under the age of 35 will only read newspapers online. It will be the newspapers who are the most dynamic online who win. Any newspaper editor or proprietor who believes they will escape this inevitable translation from newsprint to online will get buried. They are under a massive misapprehension. If newspapers do it right and invest now they will be successful and make lots of money. It’s not the death of the paper. It’s the morphing of the paper from a print version to online.
Doesn’t: John Humphrys, anchor of the Today show:
And sooner or later we will explode the blog myth. The idea that you can click on to a few dozen blogs and find out what’s going on in the world is nonsense. It’s fun but that’s all it is. …
But we’ve already exploded the myth of radio presenters’ wisdom.
