The challenge to print media

The patient is not merely ill; he is being asked to vacate the hospital bed.
With the announced closure of Stabroek News, another print newsroom prepares to fold its tents, power down its presses, and whisper a polite apology to the concept of permanence. Ink, it turns out, is no match for the algorithm. The obituary for print media has been drafted so many times it ought to have a commemorative supplement by now, but this one feels less like hyperbole and more like housekeeping.
Print once enjoyed the leisurely authority of a morning ritual. It arrived with the sunrise and coffee, confident that whatever it had chosen to report would define the day. Now news breaks at 02:17h because someone sneezed on a livestream, and by breakfast it has already been litigated, memed, monetised, and forgotten. The newspaper, by contrast, shows up with yesterday’s certainties in a world that has already moved on to tomorrow’s outrage.
The closing of Stabroek News is not merely a local business story; it is a parable about the economics of attention. Advertising dollars – once the dependable ballast of broadsheets – have migrated to platforms that promise micro-targeted miracles and deliver macro-scale distraction. Why buy a quarter-page ad when you can sponsor a scrolling hallucination tailored to someone who once Googled “garden hose” at 03:00h? The market has spoken, and it prefers surveillance to serendipity.
Then there is the small matter of cost. Paper is not free. Ink is not free. Distribution trucks do not run on nostalgia. Meanwhile, publishing online requires little more than a content management system and a willingness to believe that page views are a form of civic engagement. The arithmetic is brutal: printing presses are heavy; tweets are weightless. Guess which travels faster?
But let us not pretend this is solely a tale of villainous tech barons twirling fibre-optic moustaches. Print media also laboured under the comforting illusion that credibility was self-sustaining. That readers would forever pay for fact-checked prose because it was virtuous. Unfortunately, virtue has terrible margins. The modern reader, marinated in free content, tends to experience paywalls as a personal affront rather than an existential necessity.
What is lost when a paper like Stabroek News shutters is not merely a product but a posture. Print imposed a discipline. Space was finite. Headlines had to fit. Editors had to choose. The act of selection implied judgement, and judgement implied responsibility. The infinite scroll, by contrast, has all the restraint of a toddler in a confectionery.
And yet, we are assured this is progress. News is more “democratised”. Everyone can publish. Everyone can opine. Everyone can be wrong at scale. The press, once a gatekeeper, is now a participant in a carnival where the loudest booth wins. In this marketplace, a carefully sourced investigation competes with a rumour in athleisure.
The closure of Stabroek News may be framed as inevitable – an unfortunate casualty of modernisation. But inevitability is often just a flattering synonym for collective indifference. Communities that once rallied around their newspapers now scroll past their demise between cat videos and cryptocurrency tips. We mourn in theory, then refresh our feeds.
Still, the presses fall silent with a certain dignity. Print media has always believed in the tangible: paper you can fold, margins you can annotate, and archives that do not vanish when a server hiccups. There is something almost heroic about insisting on physicality in a culture determined to dematerialise everything except outrage.
So here we are, watching another masthead dim its lights. The lesson, apparently, is that information wants to be free, but journalism stubbornly insists on being paid. As Stabroek News prepares to join the swelling ranks of the formerly printed, we might consider whether the convenience of instant, endless content is worth the steady erosion of institutions that once considered facts a public service rather than a performance metric.
Or we could simply scroll on.