Extra, Extra! Read all about it! (Its free)

I remember when I was younger, I answered the phone one evening at my house. I was always instructed to do so when there were calls at this time, because it was pretty much guaranteed to be a telemarketer. I was instructed to say the famous line "My dad can't come to the phone right now." I answered only to hear a long, obviously scripted speech about how it was time to renew my subscription to The Wall Street Journal. Being 8, and not knowing what The Wall Street Journal was, I just interrupted with my line and hung up.

Anytime I am home now, my parents no longer get these calls, because they are on the "no call list," a list that Jay Hancock, Baltimore Sun writer, said is killing newspaper subscriptions. No longer are people hassled with these phone calls that my dad so adamantly refused to answer. Also, my dad would probably not care to get this offer now, since he reads The Journal online for 79 bucks a year. He is no exception to the way things are going in the newspaper world.

All I have to do to see a ton of newspapers all around the world is log onto sites like Newspapers 24.com and PRESTO! I have information at my finger tips. Also, if I want to read an article that I cannot view on the paper's site, I just google it and, PRESTO! It shows up. Someone, somewhere reposts newspaper articles for my reading pleasure, and I don't have to break the bank in doing so.

So are old fashioned newspapers obsolete? For the time being I think they are here to stay. But the future looks grim. According to an article by Vin Crosbie at USC, online news is the future. "Research in 1985 by Philip Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discovered that the newspaper reading habits that people develop in their 20s stick with them as they age," said Crosbie. I know that I currently read online(free) articles more than I read newspapers themselves. So if Philip Meyer's research is true, my generation will not be picking up the latest copy of The New York Times on the way to work, but instead they will be surfing the net to find the latest news.

I do not think newspapers will exactly be making millions by posting content on their Web sites and charging people to view it. For one thing, I am sure that advertising clients are not exactly gung ho about the fact that one can bypass ad content with the click of the mouse.

Also, I do not think the public is ready to pay to view news online. According to another article by Vin Crosbie in which he researched the financial successes of online news he stated that after researching and interviewing papers that have implemented an online subscription "Hardly any of these executives are willing to talk for the record, but all were rather candid about how they have induced only between 0.25 and 1.25 percent of their unique users to pay for access to traditional content." This does not exactly scream success!

So how will newspapers stay afloat in the online/offline purgatory in which they are leaning toward? I think the readers will determine which way will be successful, but for now, off to Google I go!