THE announcement by Newsweek magazine that the Decemebr 31st 2012 print issue will be its last and that it will henceforth appear only and fully digitalised has for many reasons dramatised the obviously uneasy scene of the print media worldwide. For over a decade, media watchers have had no illusion about the inevitable: the virtual extinction of the print media. With very few exceptions, the newspaper industry's early reaction was mainly one of resisting the evolution course. That was quite understandable, given that ‘surrendering' to digitalisation might have washed away the huge investments and assets that made daily newspaper production possible, profitable and sustainable. Weeklies, bi-weeklies and monthlies knew that their day would come sooner than that of the dailies. And it was equally conceivable that quite a few corporate managers and editors shared an expectation that print survivability was feasible. That, apparently, was an exercise in self-defence. The reasoning they floated ranged between invoking reader ‘habits' and citing advertisers' preferences. Neither argument has stood the test. Today, newspaper circulation is shrinking massively and advertisers are targeting the online folk. In many countries the world over, there are reports, though sometimes hushed up, that newspaper circulation is getting limited to official subscriptions and that voluntary, individual subscriptions, if any, are vanishing. Some of the world's giant newspapers are on record as having either ceased to accept print subscriptions or planned to do so, citing dwindling numbers and delivery costs as the driving factor behind the decision. Under such global market conditions, it seems quite paradoxical that the Arab world continues to witness the emergence of new daily newspapers. The observation was brought to the attention of the Arab Media Forum that convened in Kuwait last year. Proponents of the survivability of the print model argued that the story was simply one of banking upon lucrative slices of the advertising business cake. But as the discussion unfolded, there were neither statistics nor solid examples to substantiate the argument. And here in Egypt, a front-page ad appeared in some dailies last week, inviting the attention of readers to the imminent debut of one more daily newspaper at a time when there are signs that the print industry, public and private alike, is passing through financial bottlenecks. While the quantitative growth of media is commonly and in principle regarded as a healthy sign for any society, one question that sets itself forth should be whether the new addition stands a truly promising chance to survive at a time when digitalisation is not only trending globally but also knocking traditional production techniques out of service. All across the globe, news production, admittedly the main body of media content, has shifted from news desks and studio equipment to online platforms, roaming, hand-held cellular mobiles and tablets. Gone are days when print media, radio and TV monopolised the news production cycle. With such a new media ecosystem already in place, operating vigorously and developing day after another, it should be less likely that a print enterprise could be commissioned on a cost-effect basis. Print technologies, however advanced and state-of-the-art they may be, are time-constrained. To cite just one example, the second Obama-Romney debate, the Hofstra event, took place last Tuesday evening, but the press coverage was published only in Thursday editions, by which time the hard news had become past-time and had, by all media industry and professional standards, already been consumed by web folk and TV viewers via postings, tweets, reviews and scores of TV talk shows, let alone the Arabic-language interpretation of the online live streaming and some TV broadcasts. “Digitalise or Die: Why Convergence is Growing Teeth" was the title of a research paper released by Capgemini in 2006, then forwarding the notion that going fully digital, in the sense of generating such content as would be spreadable across any outlet to any device, was the order of the day. Newsweek's complete migration to online publishing could, therefore, serve as the final call for newspapers and magazines the world over to digitalise.
