Egnaro TV

Is it just me or is it completely ironic that BlogTO and Torontoist spend a lot of time going on about the web being the future of news but yet they are both working with printed papers to distribute their content. I'd also guess these are some of the more lucrative arrangements both blogs have made compared to rates paid for web ads. BlogTO announced today they will be providing a page of content to the new T.O.night afternoon paper. Both blogs have good numbers in terms of web traffic and loyal followings, but BlogTO's recent deal plus Torontoist's ongoing relationship with the Globe tell me something isn't quite right here yet.

Web prophets have been singing about the death of newspapers for months now as many prominent print rags have ceased physical production and exist in the virtual only. I call bullshit on all of this. Newspapers aren't going away and most certainly journalism isn't going anywhere. The challenge that news media is facing is one of re-modelling business and advertising structures. No doubt there will be casualties along the way, but they will survive. The problem is really no different than the exploration and discovery period the music industry is in right now. Artists are suddenly finding a new voice, free of the contraints of major labels. I'd hazard a guess that despite the massive decline in CD sales that many more bands are making a living off their music now than ever before.

For too long papers have closed the shutters and hoped the storm would pass, seemingly ignorant of the fact that they actually already have assets of incredible value in their possession – knowledge, networks of relationships, history, brand recognition and more. What needs to be done is a discovery of new ways to make money from these assets. 

Some will be successful with microtransactions, most will not. Advertising will still be the best bet. Others will say the hold-up is in the ad industries unwillingness to budge from their standards. I'd argue that newspapers should be showing them the way. Giving them new ad opportunities, leveraging ad dollars to explore new mediums and helping them create new ways to reach their audience that are both more meaningful and less intrusive to the end user.

Will we still have print editions 10 years from now? I'm guessing no. Between environmental concerns, the cost of printing and new technology I don't think there will be much need for print. Think about the dramatic changes to the way we obtain and enjoy music over the past 10 years. The Amazon Kindle is merely the beginning of e-books. Tech publisher O'Reilly has recently started selling individual books as iPhone applications. Other tech companies are joining in on the e-book market as well. Rumours of an Apple tablet continue to swhirl around the tubes. I think we are going to see the equivalent of an iPod for text over the few years – a fantastically beautiful cross between the iPhone, Kindle and netbooks everyone's been scooping up over the last 12 months. This universally loved and coveted device will comfortably fill the gap between the small screen of a smartphone and large size of work ready laptop. There will be numerous other devices that fall into this market as well and portable digital text reading will finally be ubiquitous.

The point is that newspapers, like music, aren't going away, they are just going to shift from one delivery method to multiple streams, all fed from the web. This is inevitable. The tricky part is bringing the ad dollars along for the ride.