The newspaper is dying.. NOT!

In an article titled “The fallacy of ‘the print is dead’ meme”, Josefowicz (2009) begs to differ from societal agreement that print is dying. That's because most of the public discourse tends to be dominated by information junkies and if there is little doubt that if you're an information junkie, the web is the way to go. But the reality is that info-junkies are only a small tribe. They consume the news at a prodigious rate and the web is the fastest way to satisfy their appetite. One of the posts was titled, Print is still king -- only 3% of newspaper reading is happening online. While the exact numbers are open to further investigation, the thrust of the argument is that the overwhelming majority read newspapers in print, not on the web. But even if talk about the death of print is very noisy, there's no denying that the web has changed and will continue to change the nature of print journalism. Newspapers must become digital enterprises, even if they choose to continue to print on some days or on every day of the week.

According to Walsh (2006), whether it is print, visual or multimodal, a reader should engage with a broad cultural and intellectual context, a wider textuality and politics. As practiced in the Singaporean Academy today, print media has for most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, events, and the physical senses that made it possible to render it intelligably. Kress (2003) posit a social trend away from the dominance of the written word and towards technological modes that stress the visual and the integration of multiple modes at the same time. According to him, while reading in the language-as-writing mode is fixed both by time and by strict standards of interpretation, reading in the multi-modal era departs from the unique significance of the image to a much more open field of interpretation. Van Dijk's (1991) thesis, like Wodak and Kress, implies that the exercise of power in modern, democratic societies is no longer primarily coercive, but persuasive, that is, ideological.

In my opinion, because there is a shift in audience expectations, people are looking to find information that is on-the-go. Yet it is safe today that watching people read the newspaper on the train, or picking up a copy from a near buy store has not died away and this genre will continue to provide it’s audience with deep analysis of everything happenings in years to come.

For furthur information on the future of print media, read here

References:

Josefowicz, M 2009, The fallacy of “the print is dead” meme, Media Shift, viewed June 12th 2010

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/04/the-fallacy-of-the-print-is-dead-meme117.html

Kress, G 2003, Literacy in the New Media Age, Routledge, London

Van Dijk, T 1991, Racism and the Press, in Robert Miles, Routledge New York

Walsh, M 2006, The textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24-37