by Rand E Oertle

Created on: June 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

The Time for Newspapers is Over

The fundamental change that has impacted newspapers today isn't the Internet or technology itself, but the concept of time, and the old cliche that "time is money" has never been so critical. Many websites, such as the DrudgeReport.com, can refresh or republish every 60 seconds if it chooses to, and newspapers simply don't have that luxury.

There are also those who dream of a "paperless" society where everything is done electronically. Huge pressure exists to eliminate paper to save the trees and newspapers are, well, paper.

We now live in a 24/7 world, a world where the print media cannot follow. We even use the 24/7 term frequently describing our lives, businesses and other efforts.

Newspapers and even television, to a degree, are fixed-time media. Readers no longer want to wait for their news to be brought to them tomorrow morning. The future of hardcopy format print media is bleak.

Newspapers, no matter what your political persuasion, have taken more and more extreme political positions on their news pages, not just by what they report, but by what they chose not to report. This sea change in journalism has cost media organizations their most precious commodity, trust. They have squandered that trust in ways that old school journalists can only stand it awe of, in seeing the scope of it. Eventually, newspapers that have chosen one side of the political spectrum or the other will not face just technological competition, by whether they have made the correct political position. Whether they have chosen wisely and for the long term and not short term expediency, is yet to be determined.

Reader demands have escalated. They want it now, from everywhere, with unlimited selection. Newspapers also don't have the luxury to change pages, subjects and content in minutes as do electronic images and text media.

Updating newspapers is laborious. Technology is made for an instant change, an instant-gratification world...literally an instant news world.

As an illustration of the new time impact on newspapers and news in general, the average "sound bite" of a newsmaker for a television news story in the 1970's averaged about thirty seconds. Today the average sound bite of an interviewed newsmaker is just nine seconds. This change stretches across all of media. The Twitter age is here, it all has to be said instantly and in one-hundred-and-fifty characters.

The pajama media, too, has come of age and is ubiquitous and

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