Blog de Puree

The world’s oldest newspaper, Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, has made the move to become an online-only newspaper. The paper, which focuses on bankruptcies, company and government announcements, has been published since 1645, making it the world’s oldest.

A number of major news Web sites, such as Wired News, predict that some of their number will also make the move to an online-only publishing format in 2007.

On his blog, Buzz Machine, Jeff Jarvis cautions online publishing folks not to get too worked up about this turn of events because it is not a “major” newspaper.

Jarvis and another online news-centered blogger I read, Howard Owens, disagree with the prognosticators. They feel that there is still too much revenue tied up in print circulation and that it will take some time, possibly a few years yet, for many publishers to go Web only.

But for me, this is exciting because I get my news almost entirely from the Internet and other mobile means and it’s great to see a print newspaper, no matter how major or minor it is, completely embrace a new audience and a modern information distribution strategy.

I’m fascinated by the steps that some local and national publishing companies take as they move from print to online media. Some are doing it well and others are not. While I wouldn’t presume to predict any major papers making the move this year, I have to agree with them that it will happen within the next couple of years, because time and progress wait for no man. But who will it be?