The Future of Newspapers is History

Some pretty telling new stats are coming out of a study at Annenberg’s (USC) Center for Digital Future about who will be reading the newspaper in the future.  The answer? Well, the number isn’t going to get better. Mathew Ingram at GigaOm breaks it down further, but one metric stands out the most to me:

59 percent [of people surveyed] said that if the print edition of their newspaper stopped publishing they would read the online version. Only 37 percent said that they would read the print edition of another newspaper.

Think about that one. People aren’t overly unsubscribing from newspapers, but if the newspaper disappears, they won’t go get another one. Add that to the much larger concern: the younger generation isn’t exactly replacing them with new subscriptions of their own.

Please note: The death of newspapers is *not* the death of journalism. That is all.