Not Dead, Just Suffering Growing Pains

I read Dave Winer over at Scripting News quite a bit. He wrote this a couple of days ago.

I totally disagree with my friend Robert Scoble who says that newspapers are dead. There’s always been too much made of death in the tech world, in fact newspapers are still published, you can pick one up at any airport or train station. Many people have them delivered at home. We often go to newspaper websites for the news. Sure, there are problems, and the world is changing, but imho, we’ll all do better if something called the San Francisco Chronicle continues to be published, even though the form of the newspaper will certainly change in the future. It would be a waste of a tradition, of a good coral reef, if newspapers really died.

Freezertroll and I are trying to figure out how to combine the old with the new. I guess everyone in the newspaper business is. Our challenges though lie within a rural environment.

I do believe that mainstream print media is in a huge transition no matter if its roots are in an urban or rural environment. For us, we have to figure out how to make the transition painless for our colleagues and for our audience. And sometimes, although I can’t speak for Freezertroll, I get a bit overwhelmed. I’m thinking he does as well.

We think about this a great deal and ponder our next move.