If current trends continue, printed newspapers will have reached their demise within the coming decade (see graph below from futuretimeline.net).
In the legacy print media world, content creation and distribution was a unified affair, offering enormous power within the hands of select media moguls.
With the supremacy of social media platforms, content creation and distribution has become a democratised commodity. This has its upside in that marginalised voices can be more readily heard, but it also has its downsides too in that good journalistic standards become more arbitrary as everyone acts as ‘editor in chief’. One can only hope that on balance this is a good thing (it’s difficult to argue that print media did not and indeed does not continue to generate a very sizable portion of highly questionable content and that’s being generous with the English vernacular).
Social insights 