There has been much written about the death of the newspaper.  Readership continues to diminish nationwide as an ever growing number of media channels are offered to the public, placing the economic viability of print newspapers in jeopardy.

Personally, I find myself turning to newspapers less frequently for news and information.  Each morning I go online to check Google News and our very own Aspen Post.  At work, I listen to NPR and the BBC.  At night, I’ll catch the day’s recap on CNN.  As for newspapers, I will occasionally pick up a local while waiting in line for coffee and I always read the New York Times Sunday edition.

Obviously, I am not alone.  Knight Ridder, a newspaper conglomerate, lost 21 percent of its value in 2005.  New York Times Co. lost a staggering 35 percent in the same year.

According to David Berkowitz, Director of Strategic Planning at 360i, newspaper readership averaged 80.8 percent in 1964, and dipped below 70 percent in 1980.  Readership slipped below 60 percent in 1995 and in 2005 it stood at 51.6 percent.

That’s an annual decline of 0.73 percent.  A slow death it appears, but extrapolate this forty-year average and you will find that newspapers have a life expectancy of seventy years, or ten dog years.

It seems unlikely that newspapers will ever vanish completely.  Millions of people enjoy a morning routine involving coffee and a newspaper.  However, it is easy to envision more people each year replacing the paper with wireless up-to-the minute news delivered right to their handheld PDA.  In other words, coffee and a Palm Pilot instead of coffee and a paper.  Just look around and you’ll see that it’s already happening.