Is print journalism dead?

As technology keeps evolving one begins to wonder, could something as common as reading a newspaper simply disappear?
Instead of opening their door and picking up the paper on their front porch in the morning, people seem to prefer turning on their computers and logging on to a website they know has all the information they need and want.

Last month Eric Alterman published on “The New Yorker” an article about how newspapers risk becoming extinct. Alterman believes that it is digital journalism that will take over the future of news. In the article Alterman says that since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.
Alterman included in his article interesting statistics:

• 39% of correspondents under the age of 35, according to “abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation use the Internet as their main news source.
• 9% of people rely on a newspaper.

These statistics characterize the majority of the society we live in. In fact, even as a journalism student, I rarely see people pick up a newspaper to gather their news, rather they log on to websites such as www.cnn.com in order to get a full picture of what is going on in the world.
I believe one of the reasons why people choose the Internet as opposed to print journalism is that the websites quickly show you several headlines, giving you a very brief overview of what’s going on in the world and at the same time they allow you to choose which story to read.
One of the features of online news gathering that I really appreciate is the possibility in many of them to see a list of the most read stories. Not only does this give me an idea as a journalist of what people are interested in, but, most of the times, it also allows me to quickly find stories that are truly worth reading.
Gathering your news online allows you to select your topic of interest, whether that is world news, politics or entertainment, and go in great depth on the subject. Also, digital journalism has the advantage that you get the news as soon as they take place. You don’t have to wait till the next day for the paper to arrive to figure out what happened in the world during the day.
Another great feature of online journalism is that it often gives the readers the opportunity to post comments in blogs and discuss a particular issue with people who have just read the same article or share a common interest.
However Alterman brings up an important issue: aggregation and opinion is cheap. Can we consider this real journalism? I agree with Alterman when he states that writing a good article takes hard work, definitely not comparable to the small effort it takes to write a blog.