While only a year ago it seemed like print publications were going to hang on for years to come, over the last few months they have been dropping like flies. Newspapers are closing across the nation – Seattle and Denver both became one paper towns this year, and the San Francisco Chronicle, New Jersey Star-Ledger and the Los Angeles Times are all in really bad shape, along with a host of others.
Magazines are suffering too. Just today, Alpha Media Group (publisher of Maxim) axed the print version of their music magazine Blender, and last month Conde Nast (publisher of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue) eked out their smallest magazine ever by ad pages.
This week, the University of Michigan Press has become the first major academic publisher to embrace digital monographs as their primary product. On their blog, the university’s provost Teresa Sullivan wrote “there’s no denying that the realities of how people learn and access information are changing traditional notions of education and scholarship.”
So is print dead? Apart from those coupon booklets that get shoved in your mailbox, I’d say that the evidence is increasingly mounting to suggest that it is, at least as a mainstream consumer product. Heck, countries like Australia and Mexico even have plastic banknotes these days, so you won’t even need to pay with paper money when you buy your luxury laminated Sunday edition of the New York Times!
The reality is that Sullivan is right, the way that people access information is changing. While we are seeing print newspapers closing down, we are also seeing them continue to function online, even if in a smaller capacity. This is demonstrating their ability to adapt (finally) to the times. The printed newspaper is a decidedly industrial product, but the kinds of information resources that are thriving these days are products of our contemporary networked society. It’s not that people have stopped being interested in ‘the news’, but rather that they have found even more efficient, relevant and accessible information mediums than newsprint.