Do newspapers have a future?

Students in COM 150 take note (basic newswriting, too, when school starts back next week): Interesting column by Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the electronic magazine Slate.com, on why newspapers are losing readership to the internet. Well-written, too. He describes the effort needed to get a newspaper on the street, from cutting trees in the Canadian forest to printing and distributing a local paper. The whole process, he says, is "highly physical, mechanical, complicated, and noisy," a holdover from the first industrial revolution (that's the one that started in the 1760s and ended sometime after World War II). So the technology is antiquated, says Kinsley, and it wastes newsprint because we don't read everything in the paper. No wonder the papers are losing readers. But, he adds, there's hope for retaining at least older readers who retain brand loyalty:

That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the 'Post-Intelligencer' more than something called 'Yahoo!' or 'Google,' don't you? No, seriously, don't you? OK, how old did you say you are?

By the way, if you're reading other posts to this blog ... notice how often Seattle gets mentioned? The Post-Intelligencer is in Seattle. The other day, we had results of an online readership survey by its competitor, The Seattle Times. Microsoft Corp. has its corporate headquarters in Seattle. Back in the day, the publishing industry was concentrated in New York. Now it's decentralized. How does the internet affect this trend?