Future of newspapers in the balance

Newspapers all over the world have felt the heat generated by the digital age. We have said goodbye to the hot metal system and now we are using the computer to write, edit and make-up pages before printing. Video display terminals have replaced the manual typewriter. Voice activated mini tape recorders have replaced the cumbersome shorthand and typing done laboriously in the not too distant past.

Today's newspapers come in a variety of colours to appeal to the reader. If you take a Sunday newspaper, it consists of many sections such as arts, business, children, entertainment, women, sports and cartoons. When you buy a Sunday newspaper you buy the whole lot without discrimination. However, most of these sections are not read by the average reader.

According to a recent research, only about one-third of the total readership read the business section. It is more or less, the same with other specialised sections. If an elderly couple buy a Sunday newspaper, they are unlikely to read the children's section. However, no local newspaper has come up with a solution to this problem.

Newspapers can take a cue from magazines. The magazine market is well organised. If you are a film enthusiast, you will buy a magazine devoted to cinema. Similarly there are specialised magazines for motoring, fashion, women, children, astrology, psychology and science.

Although the local magazine market is still not expanded, in the developed world you can subscribe to many magazines depending on your taste.

The Reader's Digest is perhaps the best selling magazine with a circulation over 26,000 million copies throughout the world.

Newspapers too can publish the special sections separately and sell them at an extra amount in addition to the usual price of the main paper. For instance, a person interested in reading business news has the option of buying that section. The regular subscribers can give their preferences to the circulation manager and have their sections delivered to them.

This will help the advertisers who wish to target their advertisements to a particular group of readers.

In the developed world newspaper publishers are looking into the possibility of finding alternative ways of publishing when they run out of newsprint. Although video newspaper editions are now available in some countries, publishers are exploring the possibility of delivering computer discs containing news and features to readers.

This can be done easily with personalised subscribers.

They will read the newspaper on the computer screen and return the disc to a carrier who comes to collect it. The reader is at liberty to take any number of printouts of anything he is interested.

Predicting the future of newspapers or anything else is fraught with danger. Some predictions about the future of certain inventions have been proved wrong. For instance, Thomas Alva Edison totally misread the future of the phonograph when he predicted that it would be used as a telephone answering machine. An American newspaper once predicted that the telephone would be used to transmit music and news. However, we know that such predictions are totally false.

Another major problem faced by the media today is that the reader is compelled to read so many different newspapers to get information.

A study done in Japan found that the production of information is growing at a rate that is four times faster than the consumption of information. In fact, there seems to be an "infoglut"! Sometimes, the reader is likely to be drowned in it.

Once an interviewer asked Arthur C. Clarke what kind of communication systems we will have in the future. He said, "Whatever kinds we can think of". This shows the difficulty of predicting about the media in general or newspapers in particular. By analogy, newspapers will also try to survive in the future by adopting and innovating different methods.

It is unfortunate that there is a downward trend in newspaper readership both in the developed and developing countries.

As a result of dwindling readership publishers face the problem of diminishing revenue. Therefore, newspapers have to be innovative always to attract new readers and to maintain the current readership.

Newspaper publishers have found that it is an uphill task to compete with technologically advanced electronic media and online news made available even on mobile phones. In fact, a leading newspaper editor once lamented that online news is cutting into his readership.

To sum up, no sensible person can predict the death of newspapers in the near or distant future. I hope and pray that there will be newspapers even in the next millennium.