For years, it started the day for millions: the thwump of the newspaper hitting the door, or the window, or the neighbor's dog. Along with a cup of coffee, maybe some breakfast, the arrival of the morning paper meant the beginning of the daily grind.

Fast-forward to present day. The evening paper, long extinct in cities with larger circulations, is still alive in smaller towns that have no morning editions. The argument is, with the internet so available to the masses, and, for the most part, providing free news, what is the future of the newspaper? Can it continue under these circumstances, or is it doomed to extinction?



Is News Environmentally Friendly?

First, let's look at the newspaper from an environmental point of view. Nearly four billion trees worldwide are cut down annually for paper alone, representing about 35% of all harvested trees. However, many of the trees used for paper come from tree farms, which are planted and replenished solely for that purpose.

Fact: each person in the United States uses 749 pounds of paper per year that adds up to 187 billion pounds per year for our entire population. Of course, that puts them squarely in first place over all other countries in consumption. World paper consumption has grown 400 percent in the last 40 years. Of course, these numbers also account for tissue paper, cups, cardboard packaging...paper is everywhere.

The U.S. Toxic Release Inventory report released by the EPA states that pulp and paper mills are among the worst polluters to air, water and land of any industry in the country.

Convenience

This isn't just about paper, though, and we know it. Our world today is about convenience...the faster and cheaper we can access anything, the better. When it comes to numbers and the "older" media, it is the newspaper that has the most to lose from the accessibility of the internet. Circulation has fallen in many countries besides America -- Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America, for example -- for decades, but in the last few years, it's really taken a free-fall as the web has become ever faster and available to the masses. The number of people employed by the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004, according to www.economist.com.

The internet provides an outlet for anyone with an opinion, and the ability to have a voice is very attractive. Blogging has exploded onto the web scene, and with it, more diverse opinions, leading readers to question authority, statistics and other so-called "facts" of print media.

Naturally, virtually all large-circulation papers have established strong websites. With advertising dollars providing more revenue, these online versions of the paper can reach more readers, generate more talk, and lead to more hits and higher numbers.

Teenagers now don't really remember a time without the internet, and reading a newspaper is something many of them will do only if it's required work for a project. Going through a newspaper, trying to find a relevant section and ending up with newsprint all over your hands (yes, another strike against the paper) is so much less appealing than typing in what you're trying to find in a search engine and getting 145,000 hits in 0.09 seconds.

I. Reasons for publishing a WWW version of the print newspaper



II. Readership
Gaining more readers is shown to be the first-priority reason for WWW newspaper publishing and the choice of the WWW platform. As much as publishers want to find out the number of online readers they have, the Internet does not offer an accurate measurement, unlike the print product, which goes safely by the number of street sales and subscriptions.
One-quarter of the respondents did not reveal readership figures. Some respondents (30 percent) replied in terms of hits. The use of hits as a form of measurement has been criticized as being inaccurate and non-standardized (Brandin, 1996). The remaining respondents (45 percent) measured readership in terms of individual usage.
Hits per day vary from a high end of over 140,000 to a low end of just 19. Similarly, online readers per day range from 15 to 50,000.



Figure 2 shows that the national or metropolitan papers have a much higher daily readership in terms of hits and users than local dailies. This result can probably be explained in terms of a spillover effect brought about by the large readership size as well as the prestige of the national or metropolitan papers.

III. Financial aspects of Web publishing



Figure 3 shows the various sources of income--advertisements, subscription fees, archival access charge, and Internet-related services--newspapers use to cover their Web publishing costs.
Types of online services available



Figure 6 shows that a higher percentage of national or metropolitan papers provide forums and chat facilities, archives, and search engines for both classified advertisements and archives on their Web versions.
In summary, the daily paper is unlikely to disappear completely, but current trends and tracking where the advertising dollars are being spent cannot be ignored. The local, small-town news is meaningful to many; parents, especially, enjoy seeing their child's picture in the paper or their name on the honor roll list. Is it enough? The outlook seems dim.

*Figures provided by www.isoc.org/inet97/proceedings/G1/G1_3.htm