Printed newspapers are said to be dinosaurs, on their way to extinction. Everything's online now, multiple sources, and who needs a daily paper?
The fact is, someone still has to go out and collect the news, conduct interviews and file Freedom Of Information requests. All that news that you find online was taken from the blood, sweat and tears of a journalist who gets paid to report. Nothing is free, ultimately.
Rupert Murdoch is expanding into iPad journalism, in a move that signals the new direction that traditional journalism may have to take if it is to stay alive.
If not for reporters keeping the politicans honest (or at least get them looking over their shoulders), corruption would run unchecked. You'd not find stories about graft online if it weren't for some news organization paying a writer to investigate and report.
Someone has to fund that sort of expensive yet necessary operation, and that someone should be those who want to be informed. The Wall Street Journal has 450,000 people who willingly pay for the information provided by the paper's journalists, and Mr. Murdoch is betting that iPad owners would be agreeable to paying a fee for an iPad exclusive daily news paper-less paper.
He's put together a team of professional journalists with satellite operations in major U.S. cities, and he plans to put out a product that sounds rather like the existing USA Today, without paper, presses or ink. Sign up for the service and you get real news from trained professionals, delivered to your electronic device.
So maybe we don't need newspapers, but we need the news. Maybe this will prove to be the wave of the future.
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