Independent UK newspaper to cease as print edition

Somebody posted this on Reddit which I thought was insightful. Newspapers are just not selling anymore. Why would I buy a printed newspaper when I have the most up to date news in my hand already?<p>From Reddit:<p>Every national newspaper is seeing double digit decreases in circulation - at this rate the print editions will be gone in 5 - 7 years. The independent was worse off than everyone else, so this shouldn&#x27;t be a surprise.<p>Newspaper Average circulation as of June 2015, Year-on-year % change<p>Daily Mirror 855,987 -10.71<p>Daily Record 191,042 -10.68<p>Daily Star 416,379 -10.83<p>The Sun 1,818,935 -10.56<p>Daily Express 432,565 -9.83<p>Daily Mail 1,626,846 -2.79<p>The Daily Telegraph 489,739 -4.83<p>Financial Times 214,256 -2.85<p>The Guardian 171,218 -7.61<p>i 274,556 -4.12<p>The Independent 57,930 -8.78<p>The Times 389,409 -1.05<p>Edit: Formatting

What terrible news. The independent website is terrible. It is one of the slowest, most bloated sites I&#x27;ve ever used. Average page size is several megabytes, page layout jams during loads and restarts several times.

Interesting to see the Guardian saying &quot;It may not have the status of a grand “legacy brand” such as the BBC, the New York Times or indeed the Guardian&quot;. As a 28-year old, the Independent has been there all my life, and its brand is every bit the equal of those three.

Relevant commentary, which I think cuts through much of the nonsense about the future of hard copy news:<p><i>When the Tribune Company recently got rid of their newspapers, the New York Times ran the story under a headline “The Tribune Company’s publishing unit is being spun off, as the future of print remains unclear.”<p>The future of print remains what? Try to imagine a world where the future of print is unclear: Maybe 25 year olds will start demanding news from yesterday, delivered in an unshareable format once a day. Perhaps advertisers will decide “Click to buy” is for wimps. Mobile phones: could be a fad. After all, anything could happen with print. Hard to tell, really.<p>Meanwhile, back in the treasurer’s office, have a look at this chart. Do you see anything unclear about the trend line?</i><p>&lt;Graph showing newspaper ad revenue dropping from &gt;$60 billion in 2000 to &lt;$20 billion in 2010. Click link below to see it.&gt;<p>- Clay Shirky, &quot;Last Call&quot;, 19 Aug 2014<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cshirky&#x2F;last-call-c682f6471c70" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@cshirky&#x2F;last-call-c682f6471c70</a>

Keep in mind that this is one data point in a long series.<p>The Christian Science Monitor, once one of the highest-quality newspapers in America, went full digital a few years ago. The New Orleans Times Picayune, like many local and regional papers, now prints only a few days a week. The New York Times and others have shrunk their print editions from the former, larger &quot;broadsheet&quot; format. The Financial Times published its &quot;sunset&quot; plan for exiting print a few years ago. The list goes on and on.<p>(In the case of The Independent, it was previously rescued by the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev. Like Facebook mogul Chris Hughes and his New Republic debacle, he found that the easiest way to become a millionaire in the news business is to start out as a billionaire...)<p>Print newspapers of a certain size are still a profitable business, if decreasingly so. While digital versions of those publications are the future, traditional media companies have largely fumbled that future, and they have been fumbling it since the mid-1990s.<p>Now they float in an ocean of free content produced by smaller newsrooms and full of aggregators cribbing their hard-won investigative pieces for the price of an intern. Some of that free content is coming from news organizations that are attached to a more profitable business than selling ads. Verizon&#x27;s media properties come to mind. Bloomberg LP makes its money selling monthly terminal subscriptions to financial data. You could say that Mike Bloomberg&#x27;s greatest act of philanthropy has been to subsidize Bloomberg News.<p>Newspapers were slow to recognize the decline to their advertising engine, and largely inept at responding to it. Many of them, including SF&#x27;s tech blogs, are limping along as events organizers that happen to publish daily updates.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of room to experiment in plugging news machines into other business models. The thing to keep in mind, as we do so, is that those publications will usually fail to cover one topic fairly: their owners.

another one bites the dust... Les paroles s&#x27;envolent mais les ecrits restent... I wonder in which category cloud-backed digital media is... We have self supporting writings that are 3000 years old, will we have the same for things said that go against the grain for this era?