I don’t pretend to know what direction the newspapers will have to look to find that value, but the publishers of the future will find themselves hard put to compete against increasingly competent self-publishing models. In order to compete, they will have to begin seeing authors as clients to be served, and not as a resource to be exploited.

Levi

Many communities are starting community newspapers which serve their needs. Often they are entirely voluntary, and sometimes just photocopied, but almost universally they have one thing in common — despite being run in conjunction with some often very good web sites, they are on paper.

Our first info on major news will come via radio, tv and the internet, perhaps via sites like the new Google fast flip at http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/ (though there’s much to do both by Google and the sites they point to).

Newspapers will be here in the future but they will not be today’s monoliths. We may actually get the so-called community press back to the community.

What does remain a problem is that most local publications will sooner or later want to include information from around the nation or around the world, and the big boys’ ownership of the news agencies and restrictions on reprinting except by themselves that there seem great problems in ensuring that the original writers of stories will receive anything. And I’d guess that will gbe especially important to people such as you (and me).
.-= Gordon Woolf´s last blog ..Does punctuation matter? =-.

Thank you!