There are many people who, for one reason or another, discredit the future of journalism. More specifically, they question the future of print journalism. They say that the days of reading the morning newspaper are long gone, never to return. And to that last point, they are completely right. Newspapers are, for all intents and purposes, no more. They lost most of their relevance with the advent of personal computers and the rise of social media delivered the final blow. There is no sense debating facts. However, the death of the newspaper is no more the death of print journalism as a whole than a tree losing its leaves in winter is the death of the tree.
It is true, as was stated, that no one reads the newspaper anymore. Many local newspaper companies that exist at all have had to sell out to major news distributors just to be able to keep the lights on. Newspaper sales overall have been going down steadily for years and it is likely that even the companies that still turn out physical newspapers will likely have to cut back on production or shut it down soon as well. But that’s just it, they will have to shut down the physical newspapers.
There will no longer be large rooms with paper presses churning out newspapers, but there are still written articles to be had. For years, every article that is published in a newspaper has its online counterpart on the respective news outlet’s website. This is just one example of what many people consider to be the collapse of a form of news actually just being its change to suit the times.
This may all be well and good, others may say, but it's not worth much is no one wants to pay for their news. This, again, is true to an extent. Major news outlets do charge a fee to view some of their articles. But many other sites with large amounts of paid staff do not and even the aforementioned news sites do publish some articles for free to incentivize people to pay a little bit to read more.
The corresponding problem that is often brought up is that being paid by views on an article has a tendency to not make enough money for one to support oneself, and this is certainly true of things such as bloggers, but formal news outlets conduct themselves differently. Often times journalists are still paid a stipend for the stories they produce in addition to being paid for clicks on the article after the fact. It is also worth noting that formal news sites see a good deal more traffic than many other places in which people are paid by clicks or views such as the aforementioned blogger sites and also does not require name recognition in the same way.
People, in general, are no longer fully aware of where their print news is coming from and this fosters the understanding that print news as a medium is dying out. In fact, the means of distributing print news has just become far less direct and slightly less profitable because of it.
