A challenge for newspapers

The digital age keeps claiming many victims from the print media, marking a trend that should be alarming for generations so inured to opening the crackling pages of newsprint with their morning coffee. The Washington Post, once the cutting- edge icon of brave investigative journalism, has gone the way of many others, mercifully only to a change in ownership unlike, say, Newsweek, that has ceased print publication altogether.

The owners of another newspaper of record, the New York Times, have just reiterated that famous title is not for sale, though they did sell off the Boston Globe recently for just $ 70 million ( after having acquired it for close to $ 1 billion) to the owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. While a metropolitan market leader like NYT has adapted very well to digital requirements, with healthy subscriptions on new- age devices even overtaking the demand for a physical newspaper, print media owners worldwide should be a worried lot.

It’s not just the death of the reading habit as shaped by the shrinking attention span of new generations that is killing newspapers. The invasion of multimedia news disseminators in myriad forms has triggered a paradigm shift in how news is scanned and read today. With timely warning signs percolating across the developed world, Indian newspapers should be better prepared to meet the digital age’s challenge by adapting to the new age. Broadband penetration may take time to cover our country, but the print media simply can’t be complacent, and they know it.