Seeing the Rocky Mountain News print its last edition Friday wasn't an easy one to swallow. You see I love reading actual newspapers and hate reading them online. I need to turn the pages, go back to articles and clip the ones I love. The guy with a million newspapers on his desk is me but that's all gonna change. Most technology is great while others just make you wish they weren't invented! Enter the Kindle ( part deux) and the era of the portable reader.
The demise of print media has already begun for a few years now anyway but when you see a 150 year old newspaper shutter, the NY Times taking out equity on its brand new headquarters to stay afloat and home delivery being reduced for subscribers across this country, these are dark times for the newspaper industry and it's only going to get worse.
Print media in general is sinking fast and with the advent of devices such as Amazon's Kindle the prospects for the way media is being delivered is about to change in a blink of an eye. It makes sense really for print to make this natural conversion to portable digital readers. Reading the news on small, tiny blackberry , IPhone screens is really annoying so it will be only a matter of a year or two that executives will be carrying around their phones and Kindle like devices to read their newspapers.
It's only a matter of time for venerable publications such as Time, Newswweek, The Economist, etc and dare I say it some entertainment weekly magazines to go this digital only route. Certainly dinosaurs like the Rolling Stone and Spin should make the transition now before they go away completely!
The interesting effect will of course be digital rights for online usage. Do agencies charge more or less? If consumers are willing to pay a monthly online fee for content shouldn't the pricing for images remain somewhat consistent? Of course AP and Getty have the subscription models in place but for unique images it should be interesting to see what happens. Yes, there are companies that offer free images for online usage but that's for bloggers, mom and pop websites and some entertainment media companies but for larger media organizations it's a fair question. Another issue with digital media will be what its effect would be on actual cover photographs and would it have the same impact? Think about what the IPOD has done to album covers. I mean there are some Time Magazine covers that are unforgettable that it would be a shame for iconic photos to not have the same impact on the reader. People sometimes just buy print media for their covers in and of itself! Boy, that would be a lost art now wouldn't it?
I can remember doing at least 4-5 assignments back in the day for the Rocky Mountain News. The pay was never great but I always loved doing newspaper assignments. If memory serves me right, of the 4-5 assignments I did for them, 2 were for stories in Iraq. Always a challenge to get someone in place but it was just so rewarding to make it happen and the editors I worked with were really easy going folks ( just like everyone I know who comes from Denver!) I found it to be really gratifying to have the editor send me the issue with the assignment. It made it all tangible and worthwhile. It was a living, breating document that one day I will tell my son or daughter about this thing we used to read called the newspaper....
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