Declaring live stuff dead was old long before techies picked up on the practice. It’s always been the fashion thing to do. I’ve done it myself. I believe I’ve declared PR and advertising dead. Marketing too. Also brands. I’m not sure, but it hardly matters because all the above are still alive and will probably continue thriving long after I’m dead.
Currently awake for its autopsy is the newspaper business. Naturally, there is debate about the matter. Scoble says Newspapers are dead. So does Stowe. Brian Solis says Journalism is not dead, but Newspapers are dying. Matthew Ingram says Print may be dying but the news is not. Mark Evans (and many Scoble readers) say Scoble, You¹re Wrong: Newspapers Aren¹t Dead. Mark provides numbers to back his points. (Of course, there are doomy numbers out there too.) Larry Borsato says Don’t Count Newspapers Out Yet.
Back in October Tim Rutten of the LA Times pointed out that his paper makes good money just not enough to satisfy Wall Street, which demands relentless growth. (I’d quote more than you see at that link, but the rest of the piece has scrolled behind a paywall so fuggit.)
For what it’s worth, the Sunday LA Times that lands in our driveway is the size and heft of a log and could be used to chuck a truck tire. It’s a huge pile of editorial and advertising. Whatever else it is, the mother does not look dead to me, mon.
Yet Warren Buffet (a man you would not want to bet against on matters of money) wrote last fall that “fundamentals are definitely eroding in the newspaper industry” and “the skid will almost certainly continue”.
Whether or not newspapers die (and some surely will), we are growing a new and larger understanding of What Journalism Is About. And it’s a lot bigger than newspapers, whether they live or not.
