Will Newspaper Disappear One Day in the Future?

 This is an old but also new topic. With the appearance and development of Internet, some media professor had predicted that newspaper would have disappeared one day from our life one or two years ago. To some extent, I agree with them. But when I express such an idea in my own blog, some friends questioned me on this.

In fact, different people have different ideas on such a topic. Among some professors and researchers, the cruel situation for newspaper is they play a less and less important role in the young people’s life compared with the e-media. From the early morning to the late night, young people are searching or reading the first-hand information they need from internet, not from the newspaper and other printed media. As we all know, our society belongs to the young. If they pay little attention to the newspaper, the status of it will fall sooner or later. And the second, more and more newspaper agency began to run in the debt. They can’t draw enough money for their development such as advertisement fees. If newspaper lost the ability of earning money, how can they survive from the cruel market competition?  Meanwhile, more and more kinds of media appear which will share the same market and audience of the newspaper. For example, mobile phone is regarded as the fifth media now because they really do some jobs of media such as communication and exchange ideas and thoughts. If the technology develops faster and faster, maybe in the near future we can read mobile phone newspaper on the way to work or anytime convenient for us. Finally, newspaper develops at a lower speed compared with its rivals. We can not deny that newspaper has made some progress during these years, but their progress was not enough for attracting more readers and so their market share decreased.

But at the same time, some experts also disagree with such reasons. In their opinion, newspaper is a mature kind of media which was successfully existed several hundred years. Radio, TV can’t change its role in the society, and of course, Internet can’t, either. Second, only few people can use high-tech in their daily lives, so it is impossible to affect the whole situation. In some backward countries, computer and internet are not as popular as in advanced countries. What’s more, the number of those people is much more than the people who can use Internet everyday. At last, some people who are access to Internet have developed a good habit of reading printed newspaper. In UK, USA, Japan and other developed countries, reading morning newspaper is an essential part of life for many families even if they can find such news online. Also in China, some elitists seldom watch TV, but they prefer reading newspaper as their information channel. For those persons, can you imagine what their life will be without newspaper?

All in all, it is an indefinite topic for us and it will last for a long period. The only thing I am sure that newspaper will still stay with me during my life even though I get most information from Internet. Talking about or predicting its future? I can’t, maybe only the Gold knows!