I found this page (from a Swedish publication) on the tables of Syracuse, last month in New York in the SND Competition, and it called my attention.
The Center for the Digital Future (from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism) has released one year ago a study about the impact of the internet on Americans. One prediction made is that most newspapers from the US will be gone in five years and so the death goes on around the world.
Well, never ask a barber if it’s time to get a haircut, and never ask a digital center if they think newspapers will be around much longer.
How will newsprint survive in the long run? I think this is the wrong question. Stories will survive, no matter in which platform you are telling them. But talking about print, I think we wont have so many newspapes as we have now, but I trully beleive in the long life for the ones who make the difference.
It is true that in five years we will hit a generation of readers who don’t remember life without the Internet. And the only thing we can already be sure about our ACTUAL readers is that he or she today is already very tech savvy. They don’t offer you a lot of time. They don’t read the newspaper like Grandfather used to read – page by page, waiting patiently to get to sports. They see a story that is interesting and they go for it immediately.
This should be enough to make us rethink our way to tell stories. I don’t see any publication in the future alive (either print or digital) whithout using the power of Visual storytelling in a GOOD and INTELIGENT away.
Bellow a funny comercial I watched this week. Ipad x print.