Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Lancaster could lose its newspapers

I don't know if you noticed that the Christian Science Monitor has now stopped all their print editions. From this point forward they will only be online. Neighborhood papers that have a local following will survive longer in a print edition because they have a local economic anchor -- department store ads.

Print editions are all going the way of the dinosaur sooner or later. It could happen as soon as something like OLED thin-film flexible displays come on the market, probably some time in the next five years. At that point, displays could be routinely put on any surface, or carried like a folded sheet of paper in your pocket. Internet web browsers will be literally everywhere. Paper will be superfluous, even a nuisance.

At that point, the media, how people read, and how we keep track of it all could change dramatically and very quickly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/business/media/29carr.html?hp