Is Print Dying?
I’m not talking about writing. There are more words being written now then in any other time in our history. Everyone writes a little. Do you text? Do you write on a Blog? Do you Facebook? Do you have a MySpace account? How about Twitter? Words, ideas, and opinions are alive and well in our country.
Printing, the physical ink on paper, is waning. Prices have come down in off-set printing over the past years making printing more affordable, but how is that supposed to compete with the online forums that pop up overnight? It seems that this contest is a lot one sided. In the past few weeks I have heard about four newspapers that are in trouble. Three of them are merging into a single publication to hopefully stem the tide. The other ended up as a complete shock. One of the most well known papers in eastern PA is filing for chapter 11.
I know that this is a blog about Lit Mags, but, if the papers are struggling how long until our magazines are in the same situation? What are we going to do five years from now? The possibility exists for high school lit mags that have a miniscule operational cost. Buy some software once, make everything digital, burn it to a $.10 CD. The cost will be more in time than financial resources. What if you run it on the web? You can keep updating material every week for a few hundred bucks a year.
There are some of us that dread the day that the physical magazine becomes a thing of the past. I love holding the book, mag, paper, whatever, in my hands. I am as giddy as a school boy when the boxes of this year’s magazines is delivered and I can see all of our students hard work in bulk. All of those spins lined up. Nothing like it. I will miss that.
So where does this leave us? The first amendment is alive and well. Words are everywhere. Paper may not be the preference in a few years. What are you going to do to deal with the changing times?
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