End of Print Newspaper? (analysis)

In today's world it appears that paper-based journalism is in crisis. Daily newspapers are going out of business at an alarming rate. Over the 2006-09 period, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle have trimmed their staffs. The number of American correspondents reporting from abroad fell by 25 percent from 2002 to 2006, and only a handful of American newspapers now operate foreign bureaus. Thousands of reporters and editors have lost their jobs. The layout artists are perhaps among the first that are laid off, this creates a vicious circle, as the design becomes less attractive, more readers  would abandon the paper based media and they in return would need to cutback more. 

It may be true that the new generation would like to take their news from the internet and their iPods, and this may be the very cause of the plight of the paper-based media. According to Pew, only 27% of those born after 1976 read newspapers, as opposed to 55% of those born prior to 1946. Nevertheless, it appears to me that there is a limit to this free downfall, and after certain point this trend would be arrested and would stabilize at some level, simply because newspapers have certain characteristics and certain feel about them that cannot be reproduced by the electronic media. The time would let us know if the electronic media can replace the paper based ones, and if they can fulfill the same function that  enticed  Thomas Jefferson  to write in January 1787;

The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right, and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.

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Interesting topic of discussion, being a young adult myself and growing up in the technological evolution of the internet and smartphones.. Even I find myself, not so much buying an actual newspaper any more and using a digital device to check the news.. I'm not sure how much down this is to the design of the applications (Subjectively current digital applications do offer a better design aesthetical system over most newspapers) however it's majorly down to the accessibility and ease within applications that just can't be mirrored on print.

Something to develop, incase print does indeed die out.