Why Paper Is Eternal - Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press ...

aged people, older businesses tend to be set in their ways, less inclined to
change with the times. And newspaper culture is particularly hidebound.
The link led to an Associated Press wire story picked up by the online
edition of The Guardian, the London daily. Datelined Stockholm, Sweden, the
story began:
For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages
of Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer.
The world’s oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its
paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace. The
newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden’s Queen Kristina,
became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. It’s a fate, many
ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of
the world’s most venerable journals.
“We think it’s a cultural disaster,” said Hans Holm, who
served as the chief editor of Post-och Inrikes Tidningar for 20
years. ‘It is sad when you have worked with it for so long and
it has been around for so long.” 9
For anyone unfamiliar with Swedish society, it was impossible to know if
Holm was right that this is a “cultural disaster.” Were those “crackling pages”
really that significant to Swedes? In fact, according to the story, the world’s
oldest newspaper currently has a circulation of “only 1,000 or so,” or less than
that of many American college newspapers. Since the news outlet itself was not
vanishing but merely moving to a new delivery mode, it wasn’t clear what
exactly the editor felt was being lost, and his comments did not specify. Nor
did he cite any functions that it would no longer perform, or would perform
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