The Death of Newsprint?

I bought a New York Times today. Sometimes, there's something to be said for having more than five pounds of "dead tree" under one's arm. There was a time when the Sunday New York Times would be pushing ten pounds (or maybe it just appeared that way to my younger arms). No one can deny, however, that papers are getting thinner. So are magazines. In a recent article in The New Yorker entitled "Out of Print", Eric Alterman discussed what appears to be the inevitable death of newspapers. On This Week in Tech #138 Leo Laporte, Steve Gillmor, Mark Fraunfelder, and Molly Wood discussed this issue even further.

And it seems that everyone's conclusion is the same — newspapers are dying. Some, like Molly Wood (the only person with a journalism degree on the TWiT 138 panel), believe that newsprint it going to last longer than we think it will. Others think newspapers are already dead. What made the TWiT discussion incredibly interesting was the discussion of what happens after newspapers are gone. Here's a short excerpt (which I transcribed myself, so any errors are entirely my fault), edited for length, where they discuss Twitter as a model for news delivery:

Steve: ...I was gonna use the "T" word to point out, and the "T" word stands for Twitter, that with Twitter, I'm getting most of my news through links on Twitter, which are basically going in to the item level. You know, RSS feeds, whatever it is that is carrying the specific information. So as that happens, the viability of an aggregated print source, or even an online website, is really going to be under attack for the next few years ... It's become the signaler of news. It's the first place that news shows up; it shows up here much before the cable networks get things.

Molly: Although isn't it then... is it a mainstream source for anyone or is it a sort of a very, an even more kind of carefully spliced agenda setting? Because you're getting that news, then, not, I assume, from the Twitter.com homepage but from the people that you follow?

Steve: Exactly, so there are micro-communities that are forming, and it's a very elitist model at the moment, but the mechanics of it can go vertical at any moment, and in fact, that's already starting to happen.

Leo: Well that is one of the things that's unusual about Twitter... you build the list of people you follow so you control totally; I mean, if you want people chattering about LOLcats all day you could have that. Or if you want somebody doing substantive news, you could follow those people.

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