Print's Death Coming Early? And Will We Miss It?

It was easy to predict Print's eventual death. With the rise of the commercial Internet back in the 90's, you could hear the pounding of the nails in Print's coffin. This was pretty obvious to just about everyone except Print itself -- with newspapers generally doing the put your fingers in your ears and yell "la la la" act.

But while it might have lingered on its deathbed for quite a while under normal circumstances, the nation's current economic crisis may be hurrying the funereal. With the Chicago Tribune filing bankruptcy, the Miami Herald close to doing the same, and the New York Times taking out a mortgage on its home to keep the money flowing, it is safe to say that the print newspaper industry is in trouble. And PC Magazine's abandonment of print shows that magazines are also rushing to adapt.

Much of the newspaper industry's troubles are of their own doing. They met the web with sword in hand, building up a brick wall around their publications and demanding consumers register with their sites if they wanted to actually read the paper online. This short-sighted attitude continued into the Web 2.0 era, with newspapers still reluctant to embrace new media.

And while some papers have done a fair job in recent years of embracing the social aspects of the web, with the New York Times creating their own social network and teaming up with LinkedIn, others have struggled to completely adapt, as GigaOm points out about the Wall Street Journal.

But while many trees are no doubt heaving big sighs of relief, I can't help but wonder if we won't end up missing the print media, or at least some aspects of it. While there are many great aspects to the social web, it also has its share of failings. Instead of chasing stories, too often the web chases Google Trends, and both speed and quantity oftentimes trump quality.

For those interested in tracking the hard times in the media industry, a new Twitter feed does just that.