Ted Blog interviews Jacek Utko

The TED Blog interviewed Jacek Utko over the phone yesterday to get a deeper look into his approach to newspaper design and his thoughts on the future of news media. Here's a snippet:

"Many people think that newspapers have to survive because they have a mission for society, for democracy. Most of them say that newspapers should stay because, if newspapers die, nothing will replace them. But that's not actually true. It's already slowly being replaced by the Internet. Blogs, for example, are an opinion-making medium. They'll probably become more powerful than the newspapers were."

Here is an excerpt from the interview - 

When will the newspapers finally die?

"The Western world has the most complicated situation. People have stopped buying newspapers. The papers in America will die in five, maybe ten years. Who knows? But there are some parts of the world where newspapers will be successful for the next many years. There, newspapers can easily make money.

Think about Asia -- regions in China or the Middle East -- where Internet coverage is not yet so high. Newspapers there are just becoming an interesting medium for advertisers. But the success we've had in Central Europe, doubling circulation in some countries, would be impossible to repeat in Western countries. Newspapers will die in some regions and blossom in others."

This is a pretty interesting notion. We tend to forget just how vast the world really is and that just because our daily lives revolve (sadly) around iPhones, iMacs, iPods and other various forms of electronic devices, not everyones does. Many people lead much more simple lives and not just in rural or exotic places but also in major cities in other parts of the world where technology is never as sophisticated as it is in the West. Many cities in China for example especially Western China will continue to relate news through the printed medium as opposed to digital. This has as much to do with communist belief systems and careful editing of the press as anything else, but is a reality in much of the world. The reign of the newspaper will not come to an end in these places as abruptly as it will in our western world.

http://blog.ted.com/2009/04/the_fate_of_the.php