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Comment by WilliamLP | Hacker News Reader

Why should this be terrifying and not an example of us outgrowing something quaint and ridiculous? Printing yesterday's news every night on a ton of paper, physically delivering it to people, and then having them throw it away is supposed to be an immortal business model?

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"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem." -Clay Shirky

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

> the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

What a brilliant article! It's an especially fascinating commentary on how people can be willing to go to such great lengths to deny a stark but simple and obvious explanation of what is happening.

I agree that the physical printing of news on paper is becoming quaint, but having less print isn't what worries me, it's having less news.

I want to read stories about events all over the world and their meanings, context and history. I want those stories to be written by experts whose full-time job is tracking those stories down and explaining them to me. People like that have to get paid, and it's not clear yet how that's going to happen in the post-newspaper future.

There's always a demand for this sort of news, so I'm sure new businesses will spring up in the future to supply it to me. But it's going to be an annoying few years while it gets sorted out.

For that matter, it's not like daily newspapers have been around forever. They've only existed for a few hundred years.

I guess so if you're a newspaper. :\

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