Newspapers

I've always wondered how newspapers have survived so long. They're been around for centuries, and have managed to avoid fading out of popularity during that time. Now I know why: because no other technology (until now) has been able to offer the same things a newspaper can.

Things looked bad for the newspaper for a while when the radio became popular, but radio shows require a fixed amount of time and attention. Newspapers don't, so they had appeal to people who wanted to see the content they wanted to see on their own time. Newspapers are available to the masses, which wasn't true with radios at the time. Anyone walking down the street could buy a  newspaper. They were everywhere, and they were cheap so even lower class citizens could use them. Radios weren't portable like newspapers were, either. You couldn't pick up your radio and carry it to work with you if you didn't get to finish hearing the story you were listening to. So newspapers survived through the radio's popularity.

Now, with smartphones, I'm not sure newspapers are going to survive. Smartphones can offer basically everything newspapers can: they're easily portable, you can pick what you want to read, and you can share the content with your friends. The only thing newspapers have over smartphones at the moment is their availability and cheapness.  To get a good smartphone, you have to pay hundreds of dollars. Still, most of the population has one, and lots of newspapers have made online publications as a result. The only people reliably using newspapers are the older generations, which I didn't understand why until now. Newspapers are a tradition for them, they're what's been used most of the time to find news.

The future of newspapers is unclear to me. They've survived this long, and through lots of technological innovations that people thought would end them. I believe that the printed newspaper will lose ground in a few decades, and most publications will survive solely through online papers. But everyone thought the radio would be the end of newspapers, and they're still around, so who knows what will happen.