There is no more week in the US without the announcement of the upcoming death of the printed newspaper. Wired could not be the last for the requiem! Adam L. Penenberg writes that "The seeds have been planted for a tremendous upheaval in the material world of publishing. Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers... Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses...Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously... In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint... And when young people go online, they tend to browse for news in much the same way they window-shop for jeans or sneakers: sampling a headline here, a blog entry there, a snippet of a story there, until their news cravings are satisfied... Blogger Waldo Jaquith believes that "as news-reader (programs) improve and become more widely used, adding the sort of auto-filtering and smart-sorting capabilities of a decent e-mail client, their popularity will snowball." He also predicts that print media, which he says his generation has largely rejected in favor of digital dissemination of news, will die off within 30 years, "when the dead-tree readers will die off."

Source: Wired</a>