1/2009
Who the heck is Andrew Keen?
We will get to who he is at the end of this report but for now, he is some dot com millionaire who wrote a book and convinced me to never reference Wikipedia.
On his blog, The Great Seduction, he posts 2009: The End of Print.
His reference point is similar to mine in The Death of Print - 12,000 Layoffs And Counting and PC Magazine Dropping Print for Online. My observations reflect the dire straights in which print media finds itself.
As a matter of fact, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press (Detroit being one of the last cities with TWO major newspapers) have moved to eliminate home delivery and shift assets toward their digital versions. A point Keen observes in his writing.
Indeed, in his piece on Internet Evolution, he explains how 2008 was the beginning of the end and how 2009 will be "the year that the print business literally falls off the cliff".
He nails it:
"...And yet 2009 will, ironically, also bring much, much, much better news for a media in the business of selling textual content. The truth is it’s not their newspapers, magazines, and books that are dying, but rather the archaic medium of print. And the good news for both trees and technophiles is that in 2009 paper is finally being replaced by affordable and ergonomically sophisticated digital devices for reading electronic content..."
Additionally, Dan Costa, PC Magazine, comments on the decision to go completely digital: