But journalism is alive and well.
Lionel Barber of the FT masterfully moderated the 2009 installment in the long-running Davos debate on the health of the media, entitled "Fragility in the Fourth Estate." Joining me on the panel were Steve Forbes of the eponymous magazine; Jonathan Nelson of Providence Equity Partners, the media-focused buyout firm; Shobhana Bhartia of the Indian Parliament and the Hindustan Times; and John Graham of Fleishman-Hillard, the global PR firm.
While we broke little new ground, the discussion was uncharacteristically animated for a 9:00am audience. While Luddites and Refusniks remain, there seems to be growing acceptance of the point I and others have been making for years: Newsprint is an output device, not an end in itself. What matters is quality journalism which can and does thrive in multiple media.
There are several advantages of paper: it is light to carry, highly legible, and can be folded, written upon and read on the train or in the small tiled room. However, paper has its limitations: it is relatively expensive, must be physically delivered, is less environmentally friendly than digital bits, and cannot be easily searched or processed. This latter point has resulted in the near destruction of the print newspaper model as classified advertising has fled online.
While these trends are not universal (Shobhana reminded us that newspapers in India continue to thrive), the combination of these structural challenges with the tremendous cyclical pressures being experienced in most markets should not make one optimistic about the future of the print-only model.
Instead, of lamenting that the Fourth Estate is dead, we should celebrate the innovations of the current age that can now be applied to telling the story, such as blogs, wikis, IPTV, social media, the mobile web, Kindle, electronic ink, etc.. For those who can make the leap while not abandoning their journalistic values, new audiences await.