Yellow Pages
At some point over the next 125 years, your children or grandchildren might read the Skagit Valley Herald through an electronic display embedded in their contact lenses.
But before those high-tech peepers become ubiquitous, the newspaper will likely stop delivering to the doorsteps of Skagit and Island county residents. Instead, subscribers may download content to e-readers each day or as news breaks.
Made of thin plastic, today’s e-readers cost a few hundred dollars and are the size of a paperback or magazine.
With the e-book market projected to boom from 1.3 million units sold to 33.1 million by 2015, according to the Texas-based research firm DisplaySearch, some newspapers see pixels, rather than print, as the future.
Already, customers of Kindle, Amazon’s e-reader, can subscribe to various newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Seattle Times, for between $6 and $15 a month. Plastic Logic, a Northern California company launching a magazine-sized e-reader aimed at traveling business professionals, has signed contracts to distribute USA Today, the Financial Times and other publications. Readers can also purchase and download the latest best-selling books.
While readers’ concept of a newspaper’s form may change, demand for information is expected to intensify.
“The need for news is stronger than ever,” said John Harris, an assistant journalism professor at Western Washington University. “That’s the exciting thing about the news business now.”
Skagit Publishing Co., which produces the Skagit Valley Herald, Courier-Times and Anacortes American newspapers, launched in 1884 as the Skagit News. About that time, new inventions, including telephones, linotype machines and the ability to print photographs, dramatically changed the news-gathering business.
“The Skagit News began in a revolutionary time, just like we’re in today,” Harris said.
All this technology meant that news, which once took days or weeks to get into print, could be in readers’ hands within hours. Fast-forward to today, and information is nearly instantaneous, even in written form.
“In the next 125 years, journalism finally gets out of the Industrial Age and into the Digital Age,” said Hanson Hosein, director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Skagit Valley Publisher Stedem Wood, whose family has owned Skagit Publishing since 1964, said he expects the next 125 years will bring rapid advances in technology that will outpace those of the past century.
“As we all struggle to figure out technology, customer expectations are going to dictate our future,” Wood said. “It’s already happening.”
Skagit Publishing offers a Web site, http://www.goskagit.com, for breaking news, items of community interest and even video and slide shows.
“Some people think it’s hip to say they get their news from the Internet,” Wood said.
But readers who get their news online without paying for a subscription may not understand the work that it takes to gather, organize and present the news, Wood said.
“This community needs factual information about how to live, how to work, how to play and how to give back to the community,” Wood said.
Although a number of debt-leaden metropolitan daily newspapers across the country have declared bankruptcy or have shut down in recent months in the wake of dramatic drops in advertising revenue, Wood said that many newspapers are still profitable.
Skagit Publishing doesn’t have the problem of huge debts or being bound to a joint-operating agreement, such as the defunct Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which began operating exclusively online as of March.
“We’re not in that situation, and this community needs information today as much or more than it ever has,” Wood said. “I don’t know a single publisher in communities like this or (at) mid-sized newspapers who are even considering walking away from the print product or their newspaper franchise.”
Moving away from a paper product will take a combination of a changes in reader expectations and advances in technology already on the market. Lightweight laptops as thin as a legal pad and e-readers lighter than books are being sold. Engineers are working on developing e-readers that are almost paper thin and durable enough to take the beach.
“It’s possible that print will go away,” said Babak Parviz, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. “So we may not be printing newspapers in the next few decades with ink on paper made from trees.”
And electrical engineers like Parviz may help make that happen. Parviz is developing a contact lens with electrical circuitry embedded inside it. He’s tested them on rabbits for short times with good results.
Eventually, the technology could be developed to the point of being able to receive a wireless signal and graphics display in the contact lens, Parviz said. It’s likely a wearer would need a cell phone-sized device to receive the signal and act as a keyboard and mouse because blinking would be cumbersome.
The obvious applications for such technology would be in medical, military and gaming fields, but the electronics in the lenses could mean the contacts would act like a smart phone or a laptop with WiFi.
Sound crazy?
“If you look back 125 years ago at the late 19th century technology, a lot of the stuff we do today looks like magic,” Parviz said.
Hosein of the UW’s Communications School said he expects that digital media, whether audio or video, will need to become more searchable by embedding text in the images and “tags,” which are labels used by bloggers.
“Despite my love of digital, I still love the tactile randomness of opening up the newspaper,” Hosein said. “Unfortunately, that is going to go away. … It’s probably going to change how we consume information.”
First paper, but what about the written word?
“Future generations could evolve away from the written world,” Hosein said.
Parviz said he imagines that the impact of such digital technology could simultaneously fragment and consolidate the newspaper market.
That’s because some newspaper costs — printing and distribution — would be eliminated or change. Other costs — news gatherers and sales staff — will remain. Larger newspapers could consolidate to have the staff covering a global audience, but publications serving a smaller audience may be able to focus more resources on content, much like bloggers do today.
“People are used to getting stuff free online,” Parviz said. “If they are not willing to pay for a good newspaper, what model is going to sustain a good newspaper?”
It’s a question many journalists are asking.
“The big question is how do you pay for it, and the next big question is in what format do you distribute it?” Hosein said. “We’ve never fully paid for the full price for news, newspapers. Can Americans be truly asked to pay for something they have never paid for before?”
Newspapers today use a business model that dates back to 1833, when the New York Sun, the first of the penny presses, developed the idea of providing news to many people at a cheap price and then selling that group of readers to advertisers, said Western Washington’s Harris.
Hosein said he fears that American consumers won’t want to pay the price needed to keep the journalists digging into misdeeds of government and others, and the result will be a world without watchdogs.
Hosein said he expects that in the near future, journalism will move away from large institutions to smaller groups. More “citizen journalists” will emerge and weigh in on everything from world affairs to the latest turf war at Town Hall.
No matter how fractured and broken up the news industry might get, consumers of news will continue to want one thing, he said. Readers need to be able to trust the people who deliver news, whether they are in a newsroom or at a nonprofit think tank publishing online or in another media. And they want those providers to aggregate and analyze information and present it in a way that consumers can understand.
“We’re still looking for trusted relationships,” Hosein said.
* This report is part of a special section celebrating 125 years of news coverage by the Skagit Valley Herald. To see others, click on the headlines below:
Newspapers have become a multiplatform business
Family’s newspaper lineage dates back to E.W. Scripps in 1878
Longtime carrier learned about dependability
Back in time, A look at some notable businesses of yesteryear
Company ‘lifer’ never planned to stay long
Readers share opinions of the newspaper, positive and otherwise
Newspapers provide link to past, present and future for local woman
