Audiences increasingly are looking to the web for news, cutting in to the market share of both print and broadcast news. At the same time, the rising cost of energy and paper is impinging on the newsprint business. This has caused some to declare the death of print. We think those predictions are premature.
While audiences find themselves awash in a torrent of 24/7 digital information sources, on a local level trustworthy filters and original sources of information are both still scarce. It is true that creative niche services can assemble global audiences across the internet by appealing to interest, age, occupation and ethnicity. But the web generally has a poor track record of building a daily following within a concentrated geographic area. Printed newspapers are more successful at attracting a large and loyal readership within their core geographic zone, even where household broadband penetration is high.
The prospect of a digital‐only local news future presents profound equity concerns. For The Public Press, going exclusively online would be insufficient to achieve the goal of informing and engaging a diverse local audience with unequal access to technology. According to San Francisco’s 2007 City Survey, only 50 percent of low‐income households reported having home internet access. And while access has improved in some demographic groups, others are being left behind by waves of technological change. In San Francisco, home access varies widely by race: While 87 percent of white respondents access the internet from home, that figure is only 60 percent for Latinos, 65 for African- Americans and 76 percent for Asians.
A new local information source aimed at a mass readership in a metropolitan area would do well to combine the faster pace and multimedia flexibility of digital with the street visibility, convenience and permanence of print. To be accessible, news must be affordable; for a newspaper, individual copies, home sales and delivery should be reasonably priced, and low‐income neighborhoods should get discounts.
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