Will the internet kill newspapers?

ARE newspapers as we know them today, going to vanish one day?  It is important to ask ourselves this question due to the tough competition it has.  First it was the radio, but now  there is television and the internet.

The internet has everything. It combines newspapers, radio and anything you can think of and it has made the world look like a village. At the click of a mouse, you can read any paper in the world that is online..

You can listen to various radios in the world and above all chat with friends and other people as if they are sitting just next to you! The entertainment world  has not bee spared too. There are various websites for sports and entertainment. The you tube for instance has put  the last nail in the coffin of  Cinema industry after the introduction of  videos.

So what is the future of our newspaper industry? The future looks as Rupert Murdoch pointed out. We have to do something, we have to change and I agree with Rupert Murdoch,  na Australian-American media magnate and the founder, Chairman, and CEO of News Corporation that our papers  must now be the destination.

Bloggers are  increasingly replacing editors, news correspondents and even writers as information experts, thus some of them have huge followers. Some bloggers are so popular that people turn to them for any breaking news. In the case of Tanzania, Issa Michuzi’s blog beats even beat the main stream media websites looking at the number of people who visit  his blog.

As Murdoch rightly pointed out  we need to change our approach. Said Murdoch: “We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.”

We have to invest on  online papers or media websites which will be destination in the sense that readers have to be linked to read  those online papers or media websites.

Again I agree with Murdoch that  we need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.

In that case therefore we have to have online papers and websites which are reader friendly or presented in an attractive way that  provokes debate among the readers who visits them.

In this spirit, we’re now turning to the internet. Today, the newspaper is just a paper. Tomorrow, it can be a