10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head
Invisible Inkling — Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. — home — work — about — more — 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head
Context & Ripple Effects
Ryan Sholin's list lands at the tail end of a two-year run of newspaper-reform writing in this corpus. Adrian Holovaty made the technical case in September 2006 that newspaper sites need to change at a fundamental level, Slate had taken up the blogging question in January 2006, and Doc Searls framed paper and time as scarce resources just over a week before this post.
What marks Sholin's piece out is tone: where earlier entries argued, his titles the same territory as 'obvious' — a signal that among the web-native commentariat, web-first newsrooms and rethought journalism education have moved from provocation to assumed baseline.
First-order effects
- Sholin writes explicitly about journalism education, so the immediate audience is students and early-career reporters, who get a de facto skills checklist for entering newsrooms still organized around print.
- Editors of newspaper websites already fielding Holovaty's September 2006 reform argument now see the same case restated as settled common sense rather than a proposal needing defense.
Second-order effects
- Journalism schools face growing pressure from their own graduates and from commentators like Sholin to move curricula from print workflows toward web publishing and online reporting.
- Newspapers recruiting young journalists increasingly compete against the expectations this commentary sets — candidates arrive assuming online-first work, forcing hiring editors to justify legacy structures.
Third-order effects
- If Doc Searls's May 2007 point holds — that paper and attention are the genuinely scarce inputs — the printed edition stops being the default product and newsroom economics reorganize around the website first.
- A generation trained on lists like this one enters newsroom leadership over time, making web-first assumptions structural rather than advisory across the newspaper industry.
The trend: Mid-2007 marks the point where commentary on the future of newspapers shifts from arguing whether news goes web-first to treating web-first newsrooms and reformed journalism education as obvious.