Like a carburetor, is the daily newspaper now a dinosaur?

certainly getting there, only kept alive by those old enough to be unable to give up the habit of 'feeling the newspaper while reading'.

i don't know anyone under 50 who read a newspaper anymore. circulation certainly tells the whole story. cost is poly another factor, so much is free on the net.

 

When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer killed its paper version and went online-only, circulation wasn't the whole or even primary story. The reduced circulation hurt, but was still survivable.

What really killed them was the loss of advertising revenue, this had plunged much more than had circulation. Commercial advertisers wanted the much more precise targeting and tracking available with electronic delivery, and hardcopy print just couldn't compete with that.

And craigslist wiped out the classified ads.

 

I'm still amazed at the size of magazine racks when I see them.

 

we found our current home in 2004 through the boston globe classifieds. a one inch ad used to cost hundreds of dollars to run on one sunday.

today, i get a multiple listings home update for any city/town in the country every morning for free on my laptop

job ads got killed by monster. those alone used to cover many pages

 

I live in a relatively small southern state and and even smaller non-capitol city.

I get the paper from the state capitol which is useful for state news, totally outdated for national or international news. Mostly dear abby type stuff, comics, sports (again outdated). Most stories I've already read online. I can read the paper in 5 minutes.

I get the hometown newspaper. 2 sections, 16 pages. I read for local news, foreclosures, editorials including letters to the editor and obituaries. I've been quoted in a story. It consists of local stories from at most 3 reporters. The rest is crosswords, Billy Graham, dear abby and the like. Reprints.

In the last 10 years, the papers have gotten smaller by at least 50% and their circulation (judged by papers at the edges of folk's driveways) has dwindled by that amount. Young people get neither paper.

Why do I bother? Because journalism is the only check on the government I know of. I live in a state where politicians are power hungry and they deserve every check on their power they can receive.

 

Dinosaurs?
I believe so.
My nostalgic take is when I was a kid, I had a huge paper route, actually too big for a kid on a bicycle. I could barely do it, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. My parents HAD to help me on some Wednesdays and Sundays when the ads came out. Those editions were HUGE. I could barely fit 10 on my bicycle, I needed an automobile. Thanks to my parents they encouraged my industry by helping me out on those days, BUT the size of those editions? It was 1/2 a rain forest per issue.

It's evolution. Information transference. The ritual of grabbing the paper of your doorstep in the morning has been replaced by turning on your tablet or laptop and logging into your favorite news source.

Yes, I believe it's sad. But how do you explain that to a younger generation that has grown up with instant all access to everything? And that access has nearly all been electronic?

 

Have not found US or global statistics on newsprint production and consumption. It was a rather low-effort search. Did find that newsprint is currently a tiny fraction of total paper & cardboard industry which is growing overall.

US paper mill production peaked in 2008 (not a year when many industries peaked ) and decline since seems related to offshoring. That said, newsprint in past (?? year) was 25% of US paper consumption and has fallen to 10%.

Photocopy paper and cardboard usage are both increasing. To the extent that this industry's forest impact is decreasing it is by way of recycling. That is high, both because people choose to do it, and because otherwise empty shipping containers returning to China are a cheap ride.

US per capita consumption (fiber products new and recycled) is 217 kg/yr of which 4.5 kg is newsprint. If I did the math right.

This is more of a 'fiber-based' view of industry than about how information is transferred. But I'm a tree guy; what else would you expect?

 

Trends and Facts on Newspapers | State of the News Media

2017 down ~10% from 2016

 

on line sources have reporters as well. environmentally, we burn a uge amount of electrons for the web

 

Just so, but internet electricity estimates are a bit old and don't seem robust. How much of internet is substituting for newspapers (as opposed to porn and cat videos etc.) is not known. By me at least.

But combining guesses of internet E and newsprint manufacturing E one can further guess that latter is 2% of former. Seems pretty flimsy, but it must be more than 0.2% and less than 20%.

I feel that substituting info web pages for newspapers results in much less energy consumption, but not that the point is well proven. Meanwhile, kill all newspapers and vast majority of 'forest fiber products' industry persists. It is an energetic and water-polluting industry, and is not solely sourced from trees planted for that purpose.

==
Y'all know that paperboard cereal boxes are that dim gray color because they are newsprint that has been once around the cycle, right? I enjoy calling them old news.

 

i like reading them while eating breakfast. after the milk carton 'have you seen' me psa's of course

 

If the 4.5 kg of newsprint above is accurate, it can be compared to about 2.5 kg of toilet tissue (US number is higher than world average).

Depending on the newspaper itself, other comparisons have been made

 

Finally a topical reason to link a cat video:

Hilarious video shows cat unraveling entire roll of toilet paper, then dutifully re-rolling it back up again | Daily Mail Online

 

The things you send me off in search of:

Can I burn an electron, proton, atom or any of such particle? If yes, then how and what would happen after it? If not, then why not? - Quora

 

you can burn anything with the right fire.

 

Thermal oxidation can be seen as letting electrons go to happier homes. Flames (above) being plasma are kinda different.

Quora recently got blocked around here so I'll hope that anything profound gets noted.

Cat video link makes it clear that my threshold for 'profound' is rather low.