It's no secret that in a world of news at Twitter speed, print seems to be getting left farther and farther behind. Like others, I've written about this a couple times previously, and of course there was the Daily Show's fabulously snarky take on "aged news" a couple of years ago.Read more here.
But the stunning, thrilling events of the past few hours in Egypt have highlighted, yet again, how much the news business has changed, and how bad newspapers look as a result. Newspapers were printed last night—barely making deadline as it was, because the story broke fairly late—with headlines blaring that Hosni Mubarak was refused to step down in Egypt.
But with the ink still drying this morning, those papers quickly became woefully out of date. Their Web sites have been updated with the news of Mubarak's resignation, of course, but the papers were still selling print editions that were, well, wrong. Guess they'll correct it in tomorrow's paper. (To give credit where credit is due, incidentally, Rupert Murdoch's iPad news app, The Daily, has quickly broken free of the strictures of its name and begun offering more frequent updates.)
This wasn't really a problem for newspapers a generation or so ago. Back then, they were pretty much the only source of news, save for TV coverage (at least of important events) and radio news. But the advent of the Web, Twitter, mobile news apps, multiple cable news channels and any number of other new competitors is more and more rendering print newspapers, in their traditional form, obsolete.
The fast-breaking Mubarak story is an unfortunate example of how horribly behind the times newspapers can seem (and I don't just mean their management).
Mark Potts spent nearly 20 years at the intersection of traditional and digital journalism. He's helped to invent ways to read and interact with the news and advertising on computer screens and iPads, and before that, he wrote news stories on typewriters and six-ply paper. He co-founded WashingtonPost.com and hyperlocal pioneers Backfence.com and GrowthSpur; served as editor of Philly.com; and do product-development and strategy consulting for all sorts of media and Internet companies. You can read more about me here.
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