Is Print Journalism Becoming Extinct?

by Jack Norton

In the last decade, the arrival of the internet age has changed the world not only socially, but also professionally. Jobs and marketplaces have had to adapt to a rapidly changing global scene, and a clientele that have been raised by their screens.

But how has this technological onset changed the way we get our news? The short answer: classic broadsheet newspapers and magazines are on their way out, and their youthful offspring, online websites and apps, are taking their place. The evidence for this is not hard to come by, with one estimate from as early as 2007 putting the percentage of online news  derived from newspapers at 80%, and all of the five most-read newspapers in the UK reporting a steady decline in sales since 2010.

In a world where information is instantly accessible, it’s hardly surprising that people no longer want to sift through long, tiresome newspaper articles to find the news they care about. Instead, social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and even Snapchat have made it easy to see exactly the news you want, when you want. The key theme in all of these services, is that the news is delivered in short, concise segments, with Facebook videos lasting on average 1-3 minutes, Twitter posts being limited to 280 characters, and Snapchat discover articles lasting only a few taps.

Looking at this evidence, the question may not be if print journalism is becoming extinct, but if conventional article-writing is also dying out, giving way to a new style of short, sharp, newsflash style journalism. Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti has said that views from Snapchat make up 21% of his company’s total traffic, which is a fairly impressive figure considering the discover feature was only launched in 2015.

Overall, it would seem that print journalism is dying out, and giving way to a new era of ‘flash’ journalism that takes place entirely online, but perhaps this development isn’t something to be concerned about, and was an inevitability all along, as the trend of human development shows us, people have an insatiable appetite for consuming anything, including media, and this appetite can only lead to forms of journalism changing as fast as technology will allow. I’ll end with a quote from notorious billionaire Warren Buffett, who said that: ‘if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.’