Telling it like it is

There is much debate about the future of the press. News breaks throughout the day and the web now enables it to be covered and read as it happens.

It also allows an international view to be reached with the NY Times, BBC, Guardian and Al Jazeera all feeding into my RSS feed.

So, it was good to hear Warren Buffet on CNBC yesterday morning.

“If Mr Guttenberg had come up with the internet instead of movable type back in the late 15th century, and for 400 years we’d used the internet for news … and I came along one day and said I have this wonderful idea. We are going to chop down some trees in Canada and ship them to a paper mill, which will cost us a fortune to run through and deliver newsprint. And then we’ll ship that down to some newspaper and we’ll have a whole bunch of people staying up all night writing up things and then we’ll send a bunch of kids out the next day all over town delivering this thing and we are going to really wipe out the internet with this. It ain’t going to happen”

Buffet, the world’s second richest man, The Wall St Journal also quoted him as saying “the one area he won’t touch these days is the newspaper industry”. But he isn’t the first to suggest that print is doomed. The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridge, said back in 2007 that the publication would probably go online only.

This belief is also something that I’ve believed for several years now. Why would you pay for a magazine when you can get it and its entire archive online for free via advertising money. And why would you print something if you can avoid the cost of doing so. Simple maths really.

That’s not to say that magazines will die out. The Economist is doing brilliantly. E&T (a technology mag) is also very well read. Both have one thing in common – they write interesting articles with in depth analysis, not news. And that is something worth paying for.