These changing times !

Structural changes at both Fairfax and it's Murdock competitor signal the possible ending of newspapers as we know them, ushering in a no-print era where we access our need for information by way of the Internet.
This was forecast as inevitable by some pundits when the " Kindle " was invented, but it took the release of the I-Pad to put a virtual Kindle in so many people's hands to make this a possibility.

There is no doubt that the old printed newspaper format is extremely wasteful.   On average, most people discard at least half the pages of their daily paper unread, because it contains matter that does not interest them.   For instance, would a person who does not bet on horse races be really interested in the racing pages ?    If you don't own shares, would you really want to wade through the share market reports and study the daily stock prices ?   How many male readers avidly scan the social pages ?

Some years ago, the Illawarra Mercury readers were given the option to decide if they wanted the massive racing supplement covering the weekend race meetings included in their home delivered Friday edition.   Those with no interest in racing probably saved a great number of trees from becoming newsprint as this supplement usually ran to twenty-four pages.

The newspaper proprietors seem to be stuck on the horns of a dilemma.  There are vast numbers of elderly people who will never purchase an I-Pad because they are not new technology literate, nor will they ever adopt this technology.   The real force behind newspapers - the advertisers who use them to reach their customer audience - would suffer a media deficit of reach if the printed papers ceased.

Perhaps there is still a market for print - if it can reinvent itself into a format that meets people's needs.
Perhaps the present "one size fits all " format needs to be discarded into individual sections that are each offered separately on the newsagents counter.   The most popular would naturally be that which contains world and local news, the original reason for the development of newspapers.    Sport would closely follow as a desired segment, with other sections separately covering finance, social events, gambling interests and of course the listing of births, deaths and marriages.

Customers would have the option of buying the sections that interest them - at a price consistent with the number of pages involved - or of taking the entire paper as it exists in it's present format.   It would deliver a benefit of a cheaper price option to the public and a lower production cost to the newspaper company, and it would certainly reduce waste by way of unread newsprint.

Eventually, the electronic age must win, but there is an opportunity to delay the inevitable if this industry meets the challenge by reinventing itself.