The Future of Print Media

There is something truly satisfying about sitting down on Sunday morning with a hot cup of coffee and sifting through a good old fashioned newspaper. The smell of fresh ink still seeping from the papers, sometimes even smudging on your thumb as you flick through. It's a ritual for some people, reading the latest news in physical form - but times, they are a changing.

With more than 30 Fairfax papers under threat of being shut down this week in a bid to cut cost. The future of newspapers in physical copy is under threat. So who does this effect?

Since digital versions of papers such as The Australian and various Fairfax papers were made available in the form of tablet applications back in 2010, the need to buy a physical copy of the daily paper has declined significantly. Why leave the house early on Sunday morning to buy the paper, or have stacks of previous papers scattered about the house when you can have the same thing downloaded to your iPad with the click of a button? No fuss, no mess. That's the way things seem to be headed anyway.

Newspaper companies are not losing money by distributing "papers" this way. By charging a subscription fee for the delivery of papers within the app, and now with the introduction of "premium content" to online media - for which users are required to pay a subscription fee to access articles online - media producers could be making more money than ever. The only people who need be concerned by the shift from print to digital are the distributors. Imagine a newsagency with no more newspapers! There is no telling what will happen if newspapers die out altogether. Of course there are those who will always prefer something physical to flip through in the morning, but digital newspapers are an interesting development in the media and we should definitely watch this space for new ways of consuming media. Who knows, ten years from now we could be injecting news straight into our brains, or literally consuming it with our morning coffee in pill form!