PressEthic

The New York Times, according to a staff writer, is planning to shrink their overall margins - the physical size of the paper - by an inch and a half next year. The savings this decision represents will bolster sagging circulation numbers. With a smaller paper, however, and a possible increased presence of advertisers there is less room for news content. So, in the same breath, the staff writer said that although there will be a smaller page size in front of readers there has already been a second decision reached to add more pages to the paper itself - make it thicker - in order to maintain the amount of news currently delivered. So, in effect, the possible savings represented by using less paper and ink to create The New York Times every day will be offset by printing more, albeit smaller, pages. Go figure.

I am wondering, what is the future for print newspapers. What will a paper look like, say, twenty years from now? Which major newspaper will take a truly innovative and successful tangent to the current thinking of trimming margins and adding advertising?

Some possibilities: perhaps a type of broadsheet with captions of what stories are available in depth online, or maybe there will be no "fold" to general papers but they will become, physically, more like the daily papers as open-out reading, or, perhaps an inexpensive mobile media device that will come free with a subscription - downloadable via internet everyday (phone lines in rural areas) - that could also be used as a one-off download at multimedia, wired, newstands for a small charge along with a coffee and bagel. I can see it. Now, let's all work for it.