Print media, as we know it, is slowly morphing online and transforming tabloids into tablets. Technology is creating new outlets for news and new ways of doing stuff in the newsroom. The result is decreasing revenues, operational shifts, redundancies and newspaper closures.
If you believe what The Guardian’s own journalists are writing, the print edition of this English bastion of liberal news and open journalism is about to axe its print plant and open a shopfront to sell products that sit comfortably “with the newspaper’s left-leaning bias”.
In Australia, Fairfax never saw retail as a possible way to save an estimated 1900 jobs. As former Sydney Morning Herald editor Amanda Wilson observes, this is a slide so deep that “the bottom of the cliff is not yet in sight.” True, but as the business of journalism continues to embrace digital trends such as mobile journalism (mojo), the descent into digital enlightenment can be relatively painless.