I’m torn on my opinion of the collapse of the newspaper industry. On one hand, we need news. We need reporters, we need journalists, we need people who can discover and parse all the messed up things that are happening in the world. But have you looked at a newspaper recently? They’re horrible. Just awful. And with the advent of the internet, once you receive your morning newspaper the news enclosed is already stale. The internet allows you to find out about news as its happening. Newspapers can’t compete with that. But what they can do is adapt. They can embrace the new technology and oportunities that the internet offers instead of shunning it. They can “print” online rather than wasting resources on paper. Why not develop an application for the iPhone that delivers your paper to its readership every morning; one click and the user has the entire paper in their hand. It would not be hard to develop a monthly subscription service or allow users to purchase just one issue. And what about technology like the Kindle? Or, they could, you know, put tasteful ads on their website. Plenty of websites make loads of money through basic ads. Newspapers survive on print ads as it is. These papers need to adapt or they will continue to fold.

The Rocky Mountain News is the latest large paper to fail. They’ve been around for 150 years. Here is a Columbia Journal Review article with the last words of the Rocky Mountain News staff. While I sympathize with them in losing their media home, their jobs, their careers, I can’t help but shake my head at their inability to adapt in an increasingly technological world. Newspapers have seemed to me a pretty backwards business model for the past ten years. Ten years. Is that not long enough to figure out the internet?

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Tags: columbia journal review, iphone, kindle, newspaper, rocky mountain news, technology