This video of a TV news report from 1981 talks about a new technology that might someday make it possible to read the daily newspaper on your computer.
While it is weird to think that print newspapers and magazines could be surpassed by a technology that barely existed less than 30 years ago, I think we need to look beyond the internet angle. The web's certainly a big part of the equation, but I'd argue that thing that's really made it possible for the web to beat the hell out of print pubs came along a lot more recently than that.
The real reason that the newspaper and magazine industries are getting killed by online pubs is the advance of digital camera technology, which has really just happened in the last ten years.
Ten years ago, I was managing the scanning department for a pre-press house in Connecticut. As recently as that, almost all of the photos that appeared in print were shot on film and scanned--usually at a pre-press house. Digital cameras existed, but they weren't very common, and the few models that could deliver the quality and resolution needed for print were extremely expensive and mostly used for studio work. Add to this the fact that film scanners were ridiculously expensive at the time (the Linotype-Hell drum scanner we used cost about $250,000 and our Scitex flatbed scanner cost more than my parents paid for their first house.) My point being that, if you ran a magazine or newspaper in those days you also needed a pre-press house to scan the photographers'negatives chromes before you could print them. That's just how it was. There was competition between this magazine and that, or this newspaper and that one, but print media pretty much had the market cornered because no one could do it faster, and very few could afford to do it at all.
Ten years ago, I was managing the scanning department for a pre-press house in Connecticut. As recently as that, almost all of the photos that appeared in print were shot on film and scanned--usually at a pre-press house. Digital cameras existed, but they weren't very common, and the few models that could deliver the quality and resolution needed for print were extremely expensive and mostly used for studio work. Add to this the fact that film scanners were ridiculously expensive at the time (the Linotype-Hell drum scanner we used cost about $250,000 and our Scitex flatbed scanner cost more than my parents paid for their first house.) My point being that, if you ran a magazine or newspaper in those days you also needed a pre-press house to scan the photographers'
With the increasing quality and decreasing price of digital cameras, people found a way to circumvent the delay and cost of having film scanned. It wouldn't be long before some of them realized they could do without printing as well.
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