Newspapers, News and Technology

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Check out The Economist’s excellent essay on newspapers and the telegraph, and the implications for today:

NETWORK EFFECTS, Dec 17th 2009

They do a wonderful job of tying together the history of how one technology impacted another, and how the Internet will continue to impact not only newspapers, but news itself. It’s worth the read to get the right perspective on all of this.

How a new communications technology disrupted America’s newspaper industry–in 1845

CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some publications “must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.” With many American papers declaring bankruptcy in the past few months, their readers and advertisers lured away by cheaper alternatives on the internet, this doom-laden prediction sounds familiar. But it was in fact made in May 1845, when the revolutionary technology of the day was not the internet–but the electric telegraph.

For the rest, see the article at http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108618