The newspaper industry is changing. To this day, very few people pick up a newspaper and read what’s currently happening locally or nationally.
They get hard news from CNN or Fox News, sports scores from ESPN or the Internet and the weather forecast from their smart phones. And of course the new trend is social media, where users can quickly find or share news or commentary from anywhere in the world. All this and more would seem that the newspaper industry has taken a turn for the worst, right?
Not so fast. With change comes adaptation, as we learned in high school about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Instead of taking a back seat, the newspaper industry is catching up with today’s standards.
Let’s think about this. Today the fastest way to get news is either through Facebook or Twitter. After logging in, a news feed (or timeline) pops up that has the latest buzz and top stories around the web that friends or followers have shared and posted on their page.
Now, as more and more people own iPads, they can instantly get this information on the go and have it pushed right to their device through a Wi-Fi or 3G/4G network. Developers have taken notice of this rising trend.
One particular developer, Flipboard, Inc., has created a revolutionary new form of media—the social magazine. With their app, Flipboard, news, features and other content gets pushed directly to the app itself. Users can subscribe to different content, including news, sports, arts and entertainment and more from hundreds of organizations. They can also subscribe to their various social networking feeds, like Facebook or Twitter.
Similar to an actual newspaper or magazine, users can flip through several pages to read their personalized content. The end result looks great on the iPad’s crisp and clear screen, with lots of vibrant images and videos to accompany news articles.
Other apps have continued this trend. Even though not in the same format as Flipboard, Apple’s own magazine, The Daily, is an interactive app that reads a lot like the average magazine found on newsstands today. Instead of delivering content from other organizations, The Daily actually has its own set of writers that publish stories on everything from sports to news. The magazine even has its own section devoted to crossword and Sudoku puzzles, much like you would find in a physical newspaper.
There’s a common misconception out there that would lead you to believe that the newspaper industry is dying. Yes, the physical newspaper is dying. But the newspaper itself won’t go away. In fact, I would even argue that the newspaper is just taking on a different form, this time in a digitized format. The social magazine revolution could be the next big thing in technology, probably making it the go-to source for news.
