[Cushman]

Was it easy to imagine printed news coming back before seeing the graph?

(Snark aside, it's a good point-- there must be similar graphs for the ice or telegram industries, to name two. Could make a pretty cool art installation or something.)

[patio11]

The really "Holy cow" bit for me is that even if you add the online revenue back in, the graph is virtually identical. If you had asked me this morning about the future of print newspapers, I would have said "Totally toast, of course, but savvy ones will move online."

If you ask me now, I'd say "Totally toast. Your children may recognize the names of a couple of them, if they happen to regularly visit one of a handful of niche websites."

Pick an industry you might think the US has largely abandoned to cheap foreign competition, like say textile manufacturing. Think all of our clothes are made in China? I'll bet you the US' textile manufacturing revenues graph looks substantially more favorable than that.

[chc]

As somebody actually in the newspaper industry, I've been telling everyone who will listen for years now that the future of news does not look like newspapers, not even online ones. The idea of an "online newspaper" is like a horse-drawn carriage with mechanical horses are powered by gasoline — it obviously should be a car, but that's what you'd end up with if you were too tied to the idea of horses to let it go.

The trouble for newspapers is that they're used to having a certain scale and mode of operation. The future of news is small teams running a website with little of the ceremonious structure that defines a newspaper. As long as they're lean, they'll be able to take in enough revenue to keep writers living like writers mostly do today. But I don't think there's any way to squeeze the New York Times into that shape.

[euroclydon]

Who pays for investigative journalism in that paradigm? It sounds like the whole concept of a journalist is going out the window. It will be up to the soldier to write his own account of a battle, rather than an embedded journalist, etc, etc.

[chc]

You seem to be using an extremely narrow definition of "investigative journalism." Most investigative journalism will go on about as much as it always has. Some member of the team will investigate a topic and write about it. That's what investigative journalism is.

If you specifically mean war reporting, I don't know. I suspect some kind of nonprofit will spring up to fund reports on wars, but that's contingent on it actually being something any appreciable number of people value as much as it costs.

[rmc]

What's your idea of the future of news?

[Cushman]

And I'd be happy to say "Serves them right," but the real tragedy here is that with them dies the very idea that journalism is a service worth paying money for. At least we're outsourcing manufacturing to professionals...

[InclinedPlane]

It does serve them right. As a rule they abandoned the helm of serious journalism years ago and have largely engaged in shallow pursuits that generate easy money since then. The amount of money spent on serious journalism at newspapers engage is so incredibly tiny it might as well be non-existent.

[yirt]

I know a few companies with rather successfully sell "Made in USA, from USA-sourced fibers" blankets in the $200 to $2000 range. The outlook is considerably more favorable if you go after the market segment with usefully high margins vs. raw market share (see also: Apple).

[nextparadigms]

> but savvy ones will move online.

Did you expect the savvy ones to be more than 50% of the players? Only a minority of them will move successfully online, but they have no one to blame but themselves. This is common with most disruptions.