Great post by Seth Godin–When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?. Takeaway line: “Woodpulp, printing presses, typesetting machines, delivery trucks, those stands on the street and the newsstand… I think we’re okay without them.”
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/9259/when-newspapers-are-gone-what-will-you-miss/
When newspapers are gone, what will you miss?
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I will not miss the news papers. Here in the Netherlands you can choose between the radical social-democratic p.o.v. and the moderate social-democratic p.o.v.
It’s a total disaster! The sooner the newspapers disappear, the better.
One benefit might be that my father finally learns how to use a computer. He is an avid paper reader, but refuses to use my parents laptop for anything.
For myself, I will miss reading papers whenever I eat breakfast at a diner, at least until WiFi has spread far enough.
I would miss the funny papers . . . my wife, the coupons. Besides that, newspapers just become liners for cat litter boxes.
Ah, newspapers. They will surely become a relic of a bygone era. I only use them as a liner to protect my driveway from gas and oil stains when I work on my cars.
The writing was on the wall for newspapers when nicer toilet paper was invented.
“heuristic”…. I am still laughing. Ditto.
Something to lay on the floor when I change the oil in my car.
Save for coupons, there is nothing I will miss about newspapers.
In fact, I can’t wait until more of them go under. Most tend to ape the New York Times or Washington Post, greatly reducing their effectiveness as outlets for sound information and reporting.
We would do well to remember that libertarians serve as columnists in MANY newspapers and Freedom Communications (which owns 70+ newspapers) is run by a libertarian, and even pays a “libertarian advisor”–Tibor Machan. R.C. Hoiles, an anarcho-libertarian, is the founder of this media conglomerate, and its flagship newspaper is the Orange County Register, for which several austrians and many libertarians work (like Machan and Greenhut).
There are also a number of libertarian columnists who are nationally syndicated–including Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams.
Good point Trent.
But would the gradual phasing out of print newspapers necessarily mean a drop in these writers’ impact or reach? And, at the personal level, do they necessarily feel negative financial effects?
I’m thinking – or at least hoping – that since the opportunity cost of reading print is not spending that time reading online, folks who used to read newspapers will get on the web and find substitutes (assuming they won’t choose the ‘no news’ alternative). With online newspapers as well as individual websites for these columnists, maybe their reach will even be expanded.
One possible downside would be that I’m wrong and that now these libertarian writers are reaching folks in print that they won’t or can’t on the web, in such large numbers as to actually lessen their overall effectiveness. Still, I think it’s pretty clear that the internet has been a fantastic tool for evangelizing (though I hate to use that word..) libertarianism, so we should be ok here.
Other drawbacks could be that these folks might not make enough money in the new online medium, or their credibility would be harmed from all the new competition. At least the web is pretty meritocratic, and as the folks you mentioned are well known and produce impressive content, my guess is that they’d be fine.
Finally, thanks for the point about the OC Register – I didn’t know its background and now I’ll have to check into it.
Well it would be a bit clumsy to read a laptop during breakfast and on the loo… but this can be sorted out.
Either something like the Amazon Reader but with a good web browser, or that stuff that was invented by the One Laptop Per Child project and I don’t why wasn’t yet copied: a laptop you can turn into a book by closing it the other way around, but without an expensive touchscreen you have buttons to navigate, use the slider to see what I mean: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/index.shtml
Now that’s a comfortable way to read on screen, a laptop like that in a less low-tech way could replace newpapers.
Until that, the current laptops are just too clumsy.
I’ve actually read somewhere that they are working on a thin “paper-like” substance that can receive and display news content. It is supposed to be like a newspaper but instead of getting a new one everyday it just downloads the new news everyday.
Sounds interesting, once they can do it cheap enough to be practical.
I suppose we could always stuff them in our shoes in order to keep our feet warm during the coming period of hyperinflation. Am I being too pessimistic?
Newspapers: Besides the other “tips” here, they’re good for catching paint drips, wrapping gifts, using for insulation, suppressing weeds in the garden, serving fish and chips on, catching seeds and juice from watermelons and other messy foodstuff, amusing your children with(making paper hats, paper mache crafts, etc.), reading the local gossip, finding sales: I’d miss the raw material it provides for all of that. I wouldn’t miss the self-serving editorials and stories spun so forcefully it’s a wonder they can stay on the page. I’ve read newspapers from about 1959, but recently decided not to renew our local one because I started feeling like I was enabling them to continue. (But then, reading the news from our internet server is about the same thing, and I can’t get any other use out of it!)
My wife subscribes to the local paper and reads it every day. Why would someone do that? It’s just weird.
Others have already noted some of what I will miss, but in addition is will miss the silly headlines which serve as grist for Jay Leno on Monday nights. Perhaps bloggers can put these writers to work making up silly headlines for blogs. Talent is always in demand.
My parents will miss having a cheap and easily combustible substance to light their winter fires with, given that they continue to heat their home by means of a wood stove only.
But, but, but…without newspapers, what will happen to the paper recycling business??
This may seem paranoid, but I am a bit concerned that it will be ridiculously easy to go back and “rewrite” history once all of history becomes recorded exclusively in digital form. If I recall correctly, the main character in Orwell’s 1984 had the job of rewriting history on paper in accordance with the current whims of the governing powers.
We already see instances in which media outlets will go back and alter (or outright delete) a controversial news article the very same day it was published online; they cannot do that with paper newspapers or magazines already sold. In a completely digital world, historical events could completely vanish from the record as if they never occurred with the proper keystrokes or mouse clicks. There would no longer be a need for the massive book burning rallies associated with rising dictatorships as all the “burnings” could take place quietly online.
In my lifetime, I have seen older, softcopy-only documentation become completely or practically inaccessible due to just a change in operating systems or available word processors. Who is to say that the PDF files of today will be equally accessible fifty years from now?
Lastly, paper newspapers and paper letters have been a huge source of information for honest historians who challenge the prevailing myths of society as presented in textbooks and the like (ex., the myths surrounding the “Civil War”). Could future historians be derived of such source material just because such material is supressed by some online search engine’s algorithm or the file server hosting that material crashed or was taken offline?
You guys are all crazy! Allowing the Newspaper Industry will fail. First all those people related to making newspapers and selling them are out of jobs, With no paper, who will buy coffee. No doubt the whole coffee industry will suffer immensely and thus destroy all those coffee shops and farmers, producing a global catastrophe.
How will people use newspaper to dry out their shoes when wet? Society No one will be able to do crosswords, and thus our will live with wet shoes, suffer illness, and further weaken our economy, because we have cold feet. All those people who have stacks of newspapers collection will go insane, leading to rape and crime. Society will degenerate into sheep with no intelligence, okay this last one practically happened already.
But we must also factor in the multiplier effect. This leads us to the ultimate conclusion of a Doomsday scenario. The only ones opposing this are cold hearted people, who try to combat emotion and slippery slope fallacies, with this so called “logic” and “reasoning” based on a praxeological approach. Where are these theories, I’ve never seen them. I know my emotion works, because it FEELS so right.
Lastly, If the Newspapers go out, how will I be able to read Paul Krugman’s insightful analysis on all things related to great economic thought, and those not related to great economic thought (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
In all seriousness, does any know if all this data, and digitally stored information will be available, say 100 years from now. True many newsletters, books, and newspapers get destroyed, but sometimes they survive. Chad, I think anything that at least we think will be useful to save, could be saved in search engines/sites, specifically for searching outdated and old internet information, which would probably be updated from time to time, or perhaps make it access through a certain word processors. Then again I don’t think I can consider myself an expert on the internet,
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