Newspapers dying, blogs thriving : Hugh Hewitt

No wonder Jonathan Last wrote the column I posted about earlier attacking blogs in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer. Hugh Hewitt, nationally syndicated talk show host and author of Blog, had a column in the same edition saying newspapers are dying because of the Internet and blogs.

Newspapers are dying. This isn’t an ideological statement or a heartfelt wish, just a simple observation. Horse-drawn carriages yielded to cars, and steamships and ocean liners yielded to airplanes. Consumers prefer efficiency, and the market cannot be denied.

The news business, on the other hand, has never been healthier. At one level, everything is just text, to quote blogger and newspaper columnist James Lileks. Whether written or spoken, it is all just text. A lot of that text, though not nearly as much as a decade ago, still appears in the print of a newspaper. But in the last two decades, much, much more of that text was spoken over the airwaves of talk radio and cable news……Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas.

Anyone’s guess what newspapers will look like and how we’ll read their content in years to come. Only thing we know is that things are not going to remain the same.