Image via CrunchBase

This morning three of the top ten posts on techme are predicting more pain for the newspaper industry. The Guardian interviews Clay Shirky here, Slate has a piece on “How newspapers tried to invent the web” and the Atlantic predicts that offline papers, notably the New York Times, will disappear sooner rather than later here.

The industry certainly faces an enormous challenge. In the US and the UK much of this pain has come directly from the sudden drop in advertising revenue from the property sector. In 2009 estate agents will focus their budgets on the web. The issue will be that by the time the economy and the housing market recovers they will have adopted new ways of doing things and I doubt that they will start to redirect more money off line. Newspapers have to radically change. I doubt they will physically disappear, as people enjoy reading a physical paper, but they will have to drastically change the way they operate.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Clay Shirky on traditional media: “2009 is going to be a bloodbath.”
• The shape of things to come (Guardian)
• Newspapers and the Web
• Soon the news won’t fit the print
• Jack Myers: Is There a Future for Newspapers?
• How Newspapers Tried to Invent the Web (Jack Shafer/Slate)
• Inventions and opportunities lost
• Newspapers and the Web