The decline of the print media

Taroudant- Media, in the sense of reporting news and events from where they happened to readers and viewers removed from them, is not something new to our time.

It existed hand in hand with the appearance of human kind on earth, yet with different means. It was in 1430 that the first publications appeared with Gutenberg who discovered the way to assemble movable types to print text on paper. Since then, the print media has been serving the public providing people with stories, events, news, and analyses on the different fields of life. Nowadays, this media, sadly, has to either metamorphose or die.

The press, in general, is a message, sometimes working for a political agenda, or an independent entity with the ultimate goal of disseminating the truth. But at the same time it is also a commercial operation seeking profit, without which it cannot improve and continue producing excellent content that can keep and enlarge the number of its audience.

During the 20th century, precisely early 1990s when the internet became more popular, some press outlets seized this technological opportunity and quickly adjusted to the new demands and the new means provided by the advanced technological alternative. Since the birth of the internet, which was added to the various news formats, print news mediums have lost much of their audience. Worse, they started to experience financial crises which has further hastened they decline and could probably lead to its disappearance.

Faced with this inevitable decline of print media, the paper-based press has to come up with practical strategies to survive. Otherwise, it will, undoubtedly, be left behind with no audience. Taking into account the increasing cost of paper, the charges of many employers and the distribution expenses that reach sometimes nearly 40% for each issue, one can easily foresee the dead end of print periodicals whether daily, weekly or monthly.

The electronic press has a range of advantages that made me strongly believe in its inevitable dominance over the print media. With the electronic press, in addition to receiving the news at the time it happens, the reader, unlike with the print media, is active and at the heart of the event. Electronic press has made it possible for readers to post directly their own feedback and interact directly with the author of the story or with other readers that may take away a different reading from the published story. Most important, is that the electronic media provides satisfying coverage for world events in text, image, audio and video forms, consequently meeting the broad expectations of a large number of people.

The use of the internet by the press is now indispensable. Some websites are working hard to develop formulas that are inventive in order to differentiate themselves from the paper version. It is through this online media that the future of “information democracy” will be achieved, and the information will be at the disposal of everybody for free.

Sadly, the print media will soon be something from the past and the dominance of e-magazines, e-newspapers, e-books, etc., is unfortunately becoming true. The sale of e-books on Amazon is now outnumbering sales of hard copies. The number of news websites we daily frequent are, undoubtedly, far more that the periodicals we buy. Our lust for electronic content has killed the passion of holding under our armpits cumbersome copies of newspapers and magazines. And the delight of reading a morning paper is conquered by the addictive touches of the screens of our cell phones and tablets.