Many people get their news online, and newspaper revenues are down nationwide, prompting observers to sound the death knell for daily newspapers.
But more people than ever are reading The N&O, online and in print, and the company is perpetually at work on innovative ways to appeal to readers and increase revenues.
What role does the newspaper play in your life? How do you get your news? Do you see the newspaper as a lasting medium or one that may be replaced fully by the Internet or another news source? Why?
Never put all your eggs in one basket
Personally I like reading the print editions of the N&O each morning to find out the important events which happened the day before and to especially read up on the local events (past, present, and upcoming) within the state, and to view the works of the photography staff, etc in print. Plus with paper, if there is something you want to clip and save, its much easier and more reliable and likely to outlast anything digital which could be subject to viruses, corrupted files, media storage deterioration over the years, etc.
As for online news, there's a huge host of websites out there world-wide and with quite a variety of different skews on the same topics, but determining what they all say in common can give one a good clue as to what is really happening. Its kind of like the old days when shortwave radio was the easiest source of different takes on the same news, but without all the data miners and tracking cookies like you get through online sources. But on the flip-side, online sources can also be good for highly specialized news that normally doesn't appear in the papers, such as local events in foreign countries, new discoveries in the various fields of science, etc.
So in a nutshell we need both the printed editions as well as the online version of the N&O. In the digital world one never knows what the future may hold and it would be bad news if everything went completely digital and then something weird occurs which may cause a complete collapse of digital infrastructure - its not impossible. A huge solar flare and its effects on transmission lines, satellites, etc, or the eventual passing debris field of a disrupted asteroid or comet, the ever-spreading space junk in orbit (which could become a chain reaction already slowly building up), or even a giant gamma ray burst from within our own galaxy frying all our satellites in one felled swoop, etc could one day wipe out most of what we take for granted and rely upon to transfer data around the planet and where would this leave us? Just a few thoughts to ponder...