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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 3/24/2005 5:43:25 PM
Title: Malone is wrong about the future of newspapers
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From DRU SEFTON, national correspondent, Newhouse News Service: I, too, have "been involved with newspapers, in some form or another, for a quarter century," just like Michael S. Malone. But I don’t share his concerns that nobody reads newspapers anymore.

Read this, from the Associated Press story "Journalists ponder fate of print journalism":

“Ben B. Smylie, who said he grew up in a newspaper family and loves the business, urged the publishers to switch _ as he has _ to the electronic ‘newspaper,’ in which viewers use home computers or converted television sets to get written information. ‘There seems to be a growing public and advertiser feeling that newspapers are dying,’ said Smylie, vice president of KEYCOM Electronic Publishing of Chicago. ‘It's only a question of when, not if.’

That’s from a story dated June 23, 1982. Yes, more than 20 years ago.

First TV was going to kill us off, then cable TV (hell, Ted Turner predicted that cable would kill newspapers “within a decade”) then computers, then the Internet, now bloggers.

I just can’t seem to get too worried about this.

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