When is the Dooms Day, where’s the next tsunami, and more recently, when is the end of Newspapers. There are thousands of people who have tried to “predict” the end of newspaper, like psychics and fortune tellers, predictions are just estimations that don’t have enough back-up information. I’m not here to tell you when I think Newspaper industry will die, I am just combining the most logical reasons why I think the history of Newspaper will end soon.

Nothing can beat “free”

The major newspaper companies met last week outside of Chicago and tried to create an agreement so that all newspapers charge for content to cover their lost. What I don’t get is why people would  pay for something that they can get for free, what extra value can they bring? Two generations are used to/ born with free content, and people would not change all in a sudden just to keep the loosing newspaper businesses profitable.

Social Networks

Since the rise of Facebook, and many other different networks like Twitter. It’s hard not to keep ourselves updated on daily news. Instead of digging around to “get” news through different channels like TV and newspapers, news these days come to you. For example, if you are following the right tweets, you can easily finish your daily news reading in 10 minutes by going through people’s updates and see what they are talking about.  Social Networking is like being in a room 24/7 with the people who you have similar interest/ people who interest you, and these people deliver you news that interest you.

Blogs

Blogs are getting bigger and bigger in scale and they break news more often than ever (especially technology and entertainment content), you can get information as-it-happens, so why wait for the next day and pay for the Old News?

Eco-friendly trend

Digital solutions not only provide better/ same value as newspaper in content, but also cut the use of paper.

Most of all, financially

I don’t think I need to explain this in detail, online-ads revenue will eventually beat newspapers. Below is a map showing the number of Layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers in 2009 from papercuts. Laying off employees is a short-term solution, it also lowers employee loyalty and workplace morale. A long term solution is to migrate resources into digital and act before competitors do.

Amazon started to receive pre-orders of Kindle DX and will be shipping them out during this summer. First hands-on pictures, videos and reviews can be found on Engadget.

For many reasons, many people don’t like the idea of Amazon Kindle as much as I do, one of the reasons is that many people prefer to flip an actual book/ newspaper/ magazine. For me, I am (or at least try to be) an early adopter, I think it takes some time for a revolutionary product to get accepted, then growth, maturity, and eventually decline, think about the whole product life cycle process of MiniDisc.

I am not a book person, I only care about the value of the information I will get from reading. So, flipping an actual book/ newspaper/ magazine is not something that I see as an enjoyment. What I like about Kindle is the whole concept of trying and estimating to foresee the market trends.

• Amazon Kindle is a solution for book lovers to save money during the recession period. Kindle Edition books are mostly around 60% cheaper than a hardcopy, for a person like me who only value the content of the book, 60% off each book is a pretty good deal.
• Amazon Kindle saves the environment.
• There are predictions that show how newspapers will be substituted by digital format in the close future, I think Amazon Kindle has high potential to become one of the major “readers”.

Too bad it’s only available in the US.

I am on my way to Hong Kong from Vancouver BC. Currently 32000 feet high, on 551 mph ground speed, with -54.4 F outside air temperature, and 12 hours to go till it arrives.

I just took newspapers from the flight attendant, which reminded me of the latest prediction that says that all/ most traditional newspapers will be substituted by online news websites/ blogs in 2012.

I am quite sure that most of the services will eventually turn digital in any ways and as a digital marketer I’m glad how things are developing, but I still think that traditional newspaper has it’s values. Same as books, I can’t quite imagine how students will study only from ebooks.