Newspapers are doomed (but you already know that) and who's really killing them

According to one recent daily chart from Statista, advertising revenue among U.S. newspapers continued its steady decline from last year. This suggests the sad fate of news in print and why less and less people would argue against Vader on the subject of destiny. (Sorry I had to plug Star Wars somewhere. May the 4th be with you transpires in three days!)

This is not at all a shocking development in the industry of news and current affairs. We have known for some time this trend would ensue given the rise of the Internet and its inhabitants (more on this later). And it's not a surprise either that digital advertising in news is stealing, albeit slowly, a bigger slice of the revenue pie. Compared to print, digital ads are still relatively small and it's pretty obvious that news organizations took plenty time in bring their content in digital format. Perhaps some thought this phenomenon would pass and therefore pretended it'll all be over soon. Too late for a great many, as this other chart from Statista suggests.

So who killed--is killing--newspapers?

Back to the so-called 'inhabitants.' In the information age, there are digital natives and there are digital immigrants. Digital natives are people born after the turn of the millenium. Put it another way, they grew up as the Internet grew in size and scale. Digital immigrants, on the hand, are people born before the Internet became mainstream. They also had more fun playing real games outside.

We 'immigrants,' including yours truly, were naturalized as the Internet became a persistent force in daily life. Majority of digital immigrants are members of Generation X, a period after the baby boomers of the last great war; 1960s up until the early 1980's. I'm a proud member of the generation that tinkered around with gargantuan computers, curiously experimented on vast amounts of software, and founded and nurtured the Internet to what it is now. We placed porn on the net, the biggest and best (okay fine, second best) content of our time before social networks took over. So yeah, let's give ourselves Gen Xers a break. These digital natives are living on land we built.

Clap! Clap!

Anyway, there appears to be no particular chart I could find that supports my argument. Point is, the Internet isn't the real killer. And neither are the digital natives of the world. Yes, millenials are happier getting their news fix from online portals. But no, they could not kill what they never enjoyed having from the start. They were born with a better, more efficient alternative to print; basking in a medium someone else built for them.

The builders were my generation, we, whom also founded and nurtured digital news. We did so because our collective curiosity kept leading us to something more than the morning paper landing daily on our doorstep. We proudly built the means to better expose the present, to more freely express opinion and sentiment, and to increase the bandwidth of exchanging live information.

Yes, we created the Internet. And yes, we murdered newspapers. You millenials are only really hammering the nails on the coffin.

No, we did not kill JFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Although I don't know why that's relevant.