Article: Who killed the newspaper?

http://www.economist.com/node/7830218

This article in the economist is arguing that the newspaper industry is dying but we shouldn't allow it to. Newspapers are seen as the professional journalism written professionally and researched professionally, it's also monitored and checked and tries to provide as much of the truth as possible without stepping over the line. Newspapers are also arguably the only news platform that is able to take politicians into court and have a lot of hard facts to back themselves up. An online blogger who is sitting at home in his armchair isn't really going to have enough money or time or circulation of their blog to provide everyone with potentially true facts and aren't going to be able to be big enough to take on a major story about politicians. Without newspapers Governments will be able to get away with a lot more than they possibly could be getting away with at the moment. However, the decline of newspapers isn't something to be too worried about. Newspapers who do investigate stories which benefit society are in a good position of surviving, as long as the owners do a good job of adjusting to changing circumstances. The article also states that to help survive some major newspapers such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal should put their prices up to compenstate for the loss of advertising due to the rise of the internet and also because they attract a global readership. Another reason to why and how they will survive is thanks to non-profit groups such as NewAssignment.Net who want to combine amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet, however even some companies such as CraigsList is supporting this idea even though they were the ones considered as the ones who destroyed the newspapers.

My opinion, I agree that the newspaper industry is dying but I believe it is something to panic about. Newspapers at the current moment in time are important to investigating important news stories with hard evidence and facts which they can take people to court over. Even though non-profit organisations are funding professional and non-professional journalist I believe it would be a short term response. The internet is growing more and more with new bloggers and citizen journalist writing their own opinions and trying to investigate their own news, they are therefore still places to get news from but not all of it will be reliable and some of it won't be able to investigate huge stories.