Media Futures

Like the article, I do believe that the future of the low quality printed material is going to be dismal. It just won’t be profitable to operate small local newspapers for a shrinking audience of people who still read them. It’s probably true that the bigger names like The Wall street journal, the New York Times and all the other big name national level newspapers will survive on clout and amassed wealth alone. They have the wiggle room to figure out what works in this new landscape.

"Meh, so what." via JMR Higgs

Still, this isn’t supposed to be about the industry, but about design. So what really is the impact here?

In my opinion, next to none. Ok, so those guys laying out newsprint are going to have to find something else to do, because printed news is radically different from a digital newspaper. Unless you’re so hung up on the aesthetics of the printed word, there’s no reason to fear being unable to adapt to this change.

Actually, for publications like magazines and books, the layout for most e readers stay the same, mostly because people are used to it. It will change eventually, as younger readers begin to forget what a ‘real’ printed page look like, but it probably won’t happen within the next 5 years.

There’s really only one solution to this, if you feel it’s a problem.

Keep calm and assimilate.

Via ABC's "Media Futures"