As someone who spent the best part of 20 years as a local newspaper journalist in the UK (and seven of those as an editor), I'm bound to have a skewed view. But it's worth making a few points.
On one level, the question isn't so much "will you miss newspapers" as "will you miss professional journalism". Paper is just one vehicle for the content journalists gather.
The problem is that very few newspapers around the world have found a way to make online newspapers pay. In the same way that so many young people think they should get music for nothing, many also feel online newspapers should be free.
Well, running newspapers is a very costly business, wherever the content ends up. Back when I started as a young reporter, the local paper I worked for had a team of about 30 journalists. Every meeting of the local councils, all their committees and sub-committees, were covered by journalists. The councillors were spending millions of pounds of our money, and they had to be held accountable.
But people have stopped buying local newspapers, and the online versions don't make enough profit to fund proper journalism. So now, the vast majority of these council meetings go uncovered, all across the UK. The councillors must be delighted. Countless wasteful decisions will go unreported. And taxpayers will be worse off for it. Blogs and "citizen journalism" are no substitute for well-financed newspapers providing funds for professional investigative journalism (and funds to fight the legal battles that often follow). Maybe spending 50p on a local paper was worth it after all.
Have you read ANY newspaper recently - they are all written by crackpots with an axe to grind over something.
In the case of UK papers the so called 'serious' papers just toady up to one party line or another and the other newspapers just print comics for adults with lots of breasts and talk about celebrities (who are often only celebrities because they bared all in one of the tabloids).
What strikes me as most strange is that the political allegiances of the 'serious' papers are far more extremely differentiated than the political parties' policies they appear to be supporting.
-Carol Haynes
Sorry, Carol, I have to pull you up on this. While you may have a point about the "comics" (although it's a lot more complicated than that), the serious UK national newspapers provide a quality of news journalism that has few serious rivals around the world. Yes, papers have publicly-stated political preferences -- it's an odd British tradition -- but that does not prevent journalists doing their job. I may not agree with the political leanings of the Daily Telegraph, but it does not stop me acknowledging the excellence of their news pages. Generally they are comprehensive, well balanced and authoritative. They save most of the politicized rants for the feature pages. And that's as it should be.
