I felt like the two articles were extremely informative about the future and past of the transition from print to online news. In "Finishable News" it described how The Guardian is trying to reach readers using a mobile-friendly app. I believe that no one could have predicted just how integrated the smart phone would become into our every day lives and almost every activity we do, so it makes sense that many news papers formulated their online sources for the iPad, which they believed would be the future of online news. What The Guardian has done is extremely smart and resourceful, as many people, especially young people, do not own tablets at all and rely almost completely on their phones for news. Because of this, The Guardian is profitable for the first time in years, which is a huge step towards salvaging a dying industry in my opinion. For newspapers to stay afloat for the foreseeable future, I believe they will have to adapt to the devices and methods people incorporate into their daily routines. Just as some people like to hold a physical newspaper at breakfast, I look at my news app on my phone as soon as I wake up. For some people that could easily be The Guardian or any other news source with a reputable name attached to it, and I feel like that is the smartest thing a newspaper could do. I feel that this shows that there could be a real future for newspapers for many more years to come. The internet does not have to be the death of the newspaper, just a new beginning for it.
"Touching the Future" was a very interesting look into the very beginnings of online journalism. Many at the time believed that the iPad or tablet would be the only logical transition from a physical newspaper, but this has proven to be untrue. I had never realized that a contributing factor to this was when the arrival of affordable tablets had actually occurred. By the time tablets were more common among every social class, the newspaper had already began to decline. It was also very interesting to read that Roger Fidler had already envisioned how the newspaper would operate 30 years before it happened. He imagined in 1980 that people would read their news on tablets before the tablet was even invented. However, the one thing that he did incorrectly predict was that this would be a widespread and highly successful practice. This simply didn't happen, maybe because the tablet wasn't made affordable and accessible in time, or maybe because the tablet is just simply not most people's chosen medium for media consumption. The tablet is large and bulky even today, and is rendered useless to many by their cellphone, which can do every function a tablet can plus many more. For many people, their whole professional and social ecosystem exists on their phones, so why would they purchase and use a separate device just for news? Fidler believes that after the coronavirus newspapers won't stand a chance at survival, but I strongly disagree. I believe that if newspapers offer their news in a way that is simple and organized and readily accessible on the smart phone, people would happily switch to reading their newspapers online, and would most likely pay for that service. So many people pay for their music, tv shows, and even online shopping to be in one central location, and most importantly personalized unique to them, that I feel that they would pay for their news to be accessible in that same fashion.
