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Pricey Newspaper Content Will Vanish

The perfect storm of readers and advertisers who are migrating away from print, added to a steep recession, is threatening to destroy newspapers as we know them. Papers now seem to be the equivalent of the railroads at the start of the twentieth century: a once-great business eclipsed by a new technology.

But even as big papers have become less profitable they've become more popular. The blogosphere, which piggybacks on traditional journalism's content, has magnified the reach of newspapers. People use papers more than they did a decade ago. The difference is that today they don't have to pay for them.

Because of that, we will soon see fewer newspapers in existence. Some big American cities will have no local newspaper. More importantly, we're sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. In the near future, we're going to start getting what we pay for, "and we may find out just how little that is."

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Read the whole story at The New Yorker »

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