Reading a newspaper or two at lunch (because I usually miss breakfast) is my favorite part of the day. The Circuits section of the New York Times is the highlight of my Thursdays, and I always read it at the dining room table rather than on the web. I am an internet geek, but I still prefer The Real Thing.
Part of me has always insisted that the web won't exterminate newspapers as quickly the newspaper pessimists and web optimists suggest. Each day, I watch a dozen college-aged girls swap sections of the paper over lunch. And when we decide which subscriptions we'll be ordering for the year, the weekend Kansas City Star and Newsweek always get top votes. While I know I have an atypical sample of young people, we're proof that even if papers' audience may be aging, there is still a population of dedicated young readers.
Sure, circulation may decrease. But web news isn't superior enough to steal away the whole newspaper audience yet. Most web news sites don't even have a stable economic model. Site visitors don't want to have to log in to content — let alone pay for it — and they won't stick around sites plagued by pop-up ads either.
I'm not saying that news will stay analog forever — It's evolution, but evolution's usually a pretty slow process. Eventually the web guys will find a workable economic model. Will my kids grow up reading newspapers at our breakfast table? I hope so, but it's quite possible they won't. I suspect major metro papers will find a way to survive, along with a decent showing of niche papers, while the "average" paper will find a more stable home on the internet.
The way I imagine it, I'll get my news wirelessly through news feed subscriptions much like current RSS readers, but with better built-in multimedia. My shiny little phone/computer/whatever device will show the latest headlines of whichever news sites I've paid to access. One click takes me the full article, another click might take me to video or a discussion forum. And since this is the future (so I'm reading my news from the offspring of a cell phone), the discussion forum might not be text-based, but real-time audio chat, instead. Maybe I have to pay extra for that. Surely someone would pay to argue out loud with strangers from the convenience of their own home. Isn't that what technology does for us, allow us to interact with people without really interacting with people?
Rants on isolation via technology aside, the future of internet news is uncertain. Whatever it is, it'll impress us when it comes. But I'm planning on Thursday being Circuits Lunch for the foreseeable future.
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