The Future of the Newspaper Industry

One early afternoon, I was taking my dog for a walk. I remember buying a Star Tribune paper for fifty cents. When I looked at the paper, I started to think. What is the future of the newspaper? Will we even need printing presses and journalists in ten or twenty years? Newspapers are making their way to the Internet. Who needs newspapers when there are millions of blogs out there to get news from? People are using networking sites like Twitter to stay up to date with events since people's lives are busier than ever before. Why travel to a store or a newspaper stand to pay for a paper when you can read the Star Tribune's or New York Time's online editions for free? Don't get me wrong. The newspaper industry is going to be around for a long time. The question is: for how long? Newspaper sales have been declining ever since the advent of the radio in the 1920s and the television in the 1950s. Now, this industry is being threatened by the World Wide Web. With the web, anyone can be a journalist. You just have to have some great ideas, and the cost is free. Over 70 million people have blogging sites. Anyone in the world can access these sites for news, information, entertainment, videos, photos, and more. Many news organizations have created blogs to interact with their audiences. Also, these organizations have received many of their news stories from blog posts. You do not even need to go to school to become a journalist anymore. The number of citizen journalists who work at home while entering blog entries into their computers is augmenting. Traditional forms of media like the newspaper are declining and are having a hard time making money. Some have argued that newspapers should charge for their sites. If they start charging, will people really begin paying? There are so many alternative news locations besides the newspaper. Many people see the newspaper industry fading because of the massive entrance this world has taken into the 21st century with the Internet, blogs, twitter, facebook, cell phones, and citizen reporting. I am one of those people who still likes to pick up a hard copy of The Minnesota Daily or The Star Tribune. The future of the newspaper is brighter than ever. Journalism is one of the fastest growing career paths in the future with all of the technology emerging that creates platforms to get the word out. What is the future of an industry in the 21st century that has been around since the 1400s?