Death of Print Or Birth of In-Print

I watched no television today. I feel like I missed little. I did go through the newspapers, but only fleetingly and it was more for the habit sake. However, by late evening I felt I was missing something. Because of meetings, I did not check my mail and surf the net for my varying needs, and this was surely leaving me jittery. On an average, I spend 2 hours per day on the Internet, 30 minutes in newspapers, 15 minutes on text messages using my mobile handset, and 10 minutes on television.


Traditional media has given way to new-age media. Technology has invaded our consciousnesses like never before. It has altered the way we construct and decode information. In addition to print, we have the option of getting news in our cell phone or get aggregated news on out computer screen, as a result of what we may call package journalism – Google aggregates news from various sources and packages these for us.

In less than a decade, new media has metamorphosed the pattern of information dissemination and display. The age-old print media – newspaper, magazines, books – are faced with unprecedented threats from new-media vehicles especially the Internet, a whirlpool of information, tornado of ideas. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.

Delivering a lecture few years ago at Columbia University’s Journalism School the then Editor-at-Large of Time Inc Daniel Okrent had professed, “Twenty, thirty, at the outside forty years from now, we will look back on the print media the way we look back on travel by horse and carriage, or by wind-powered ship.” He advanced numerous arguments to support this dictum.

First, technology evolves – we have fast moved from mainframe computers to laptops – which for Okrent was his professional life’s “locus, library and liver”. The speed is enthralling and captivating, making us all subservient to it – our crave for processors’ speed today is as pressing as nomads hunt for leafs! The hurried prose of the daily newspapers, what many called, “the first rough drafts of history” is giving way to ever-modifiable contents of the web.

The rhetoric is backed by empirical evidence as well. Newspaper Association of America had found that number of people employed in the print industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have attracted ire of investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. In 2006, investment bank Morgan Stanley attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

More recently the World Press Institute had found that barring in India and China newspaper circulation in most developed countries were on a decline. The instant cause of beneficiary of this has been the Internet. The Businessweek in an April 2010 article ‘The Print Media Are Doomed’ has captured the marketing logic for the continued demise of newspapers: “It’s not that print is bad. It’s that digital is better. It has too many advantages (and there’ll only be more): ubiquity, speed, permanence, searchability, the ability to update, the ability to remix, targeting, interaction, marketing via links, data feedback. Digital transcends the limitations of—and incorporates the best of—individual media.”

Little surprise marketers are drooling over the dynamic new medium, which offers huge advantages over its predecessor static print medium.

Do we jump on to conclude that the print is dead, or it is the beginning of the end of print? I shall be circumspect, yet.

I shall not call it death of print but instead birth of in-print or print on the Internet – which shall still pull together the print media for some time to come. Meyer’s 2043 prophecy may still border on the realm of fragile possibility, at least in the Indian context.

Even as we join the cacophony of the speed and dynamism of the Internet, we can’t overlook certain crises that the medium is likely to expose us to. Given its fluid character – and negligent barriers of who can or can’t take the reins of news dissemination – Internet will become a collage of chaos in future. It shall bubble with weird and absurd – it still does to a great extent – and cause us to consume limitless nonsense. It shall bombard us with inanities and abundance. We shall be forced to spend hours filtering the relevant from the irrelevant – it still does to some extent. We shall be forced to constantly struggle with news and information which would be relevant to us. The abyss-like character of the Internet, I am afraid, may turn us into blind crawlers, meandering endlessly, constantly exposed to the vulnerability of information overload. Internet will confuse us, constrict our thinking, corrupt our senses. We may resort back to print, for all you know. Okrent may take a leaf out the new-found obsession of modern civilization with ancient practices such as Yoga and Ayurveda.

Only the form of the print may change in the context of the rise of the Internet.

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