newspaper and...

This week I've been reading articles from "a flying seminar on the future of news".  The articles are all orbiting around one central topic: the future of newspaper/news media/journalism. The industry of newspaper has been shrinking ever since the emergence and prevalence of radios, televisions, which have taken over most of the accountability of spreading the "fact-oriented" news, or the so-called "breaking news."  Yet newspaper didn't face its death penalty until the online society became a crucial, inseparable, and unavoidable element of human life. Nowadays almost everything in real life is being digitalized, adapted, recreated, and relocated into the vase virtual world. Newspaper is, of course, one of the "almost everything." Newspaper is losing its stand point in the world where thousands of millions of ways of either receiving/retrieving or broadcasting/reporting news, facts, information, journals, comments, critiques are opened up to every inhabitants.

So what impacts does the dying of newspaper have on the news industry, on  journalism/journalists, or even on the whole society? These questions are exactly what the articles in the seminar are trying to inspect, to break down, to reason, and hopefully to give some answers or directions for people who are facing, witnessing, effected, or unaware but influenced by this dramatic and painful evolving of the newspaper industry.

Compared to the future of newspaper/news media/journalism, I am actually more interested in the future of human beings' relationship to the world, to each other, and to themselves. Newspaper and the printing press have, to some extent, catalyzed the building, regulating, and solidifying of nation-states as well as citizenship. Through the action of flipping through the same paper, reading the same news, discussing and commenting on the same stories, people who live within the circulating region start to form a collective identification with the region and the people live there.

Now the boundaries of circulation have long been wiped out, and the monopoly of distribution of news/information has been broken; what kind of news media form, or new media will come next? And what change will the new, surviving, winning media species bring to the power structure, to citizens' identity, and to the relationship between the states and citizens?