CBC News Sunday featured a piece on the future of newspapers for which I was interviewed last week.
The piece airs on CBC-TV at 10:00pm in Canada and the segment is about an hour into the two-hour show. For those of you outside Canada, the video is already available on the CBC News Sunday website (though I wish I could embed it here).
While newspapers do much of the original reporting we rely on for our news, it is the institution of print that is in trouble, rather than the institution of journalism.
Many of the newspapers in trouble are paying the price of questionable financial decisions taken on in times of plenty.
But the key question is whether we still need a print product, published once a day, that offers a bundle of news and information that aims to appeal to as many people as possible.
Once that bundle was the most convenient way to find out about the world around us. Now the product has been unbundled and the internet provides the convenience.
The real question is where a product printed daily on dead trees fits into our news habits today.
Coincidentally, the Globe and Mail also looks at turmoil in the print news industry, asking if democracy written in ink is disappearing.
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