British newspapers to die in 2019

There have been all sorts of predictions about the exact moment when newspapers will vanish. Anyone who has dared to put a date to the disappearance of newsprint has, naturally enough, suffered from much scorn.

But an Australian-based futurist, Ross Dawson, is clearly unworried by the inevitable brickbats that will strike him.

So here are his predictions: newspapers will cease to exist in the US within seven years. They will die in Britain and Iceland in 2019, in Canada and Norway in 2020 and in Australia in 2022.

That's going to be a bad period for ink-on-dead-trees because papers will also become extinct in Hong Kong, Finland, Singapore and Greenland the the following couple of years.

But France, due to governmental support for newspapers, will have papers until 2029 and Germany will last out until 2030.

Dawson has published a "newspaper extinction timeline" on his blog, along with his reasoning.

He predicts newsprint will be "insignificant" in 52 countries by 2040, where it will replaced by technologies such as lightweight, interactive digital paper that can show video, but can also be rolled and folded.

However, newspapers will continue to flourish in developing markets such as Africa, parts of South America and parts of Asia.

Dawson is quoted in The Australian as saying:"In the developed world, newspapers are in the process of becoming extinct, driven by rapidly changing use of media and revenues out of line with cost structures."

He believes that the key transcendent technological breakthrough will be the marketing of devices more convenient to use than the iPad.

Sources: Ross Dawson blog/The Australian