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‘N.Y. Times owner: Print version irrelevant or gone in 5 years!’
February 9, 2007 | 12:21 am
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By David Rothman
Details from MobileRead, Haaretz.com, Print Is Dead and UPI.
The TeleRead take: Wi-fi up the subways and even strap-hangers will be able to read the Times—on their PDAs. Not to mention existing cellphone-related possibilities. And how about roll-out screens to add to the fun? Who needs to wrestle with a big, bulky newspaper if the right technology is in place? Of course, quite correctly, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. sees the Times as much more than just for local strap-hangers.
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Comments:
For some of us, the Times is already a stiff. Escaping paper for digital won’t improve its imperial politics or anti-green gusto for suburban sprawl, or its elite take on who should have agency to talk about the world.
It’s not paper, after all, but wealthy gatekeepers like Sulzberger who are becoming obsolete. US papers aren’t losing 3% annual readership only because they’re printed, but because of what they print: a wheezing, uni-directional narrative whose followers are slowly dying off. (Some good is being lost, too, obviously.)
You can recreate that legacy digitally, but why bother? Better to let these businesses fall apart and be reconstituted as the ungoverned and ungovernable web, where you won’t need a Sulzberger to read your Krugman.