Not surprisingly, people have shifted their consumption to technology, or to the web—thus web usage is has increased, not dropped, and it is now considered by many as a mainstream medium. It’s is the leading medium used by people at work and the second most widely used medium at home behind TV. Even with TV, people now TiVo or DVR shows and watch them later only to fast-forward through commercials, or even fast-forward to the specific few minutes within the program that they want. Or through news aggregators and the like, they use the web to find broadcast TV news clips, or funny tidbits from Jay Leno’s opening monologue on ‘The Tonight Show’ from the night before.
Despite the fact that people spent less time consuming media in 2006, total media or communication spending in 2006 rose 6.8% to $885.2 billion dollars. Forecasts call for total spending to reach $900 billion in 2007 and as much as $1.2 trillion by 2011. But this will primarily be to the benefit of online/web spending and at the expense of newspaper.
Do you think traditional mediums such as newspapers and magazines are on the brink of extinction? Will the web ever replace them completely? If so, how long until we are truly a paperless media consumption society—to where we retrieve all of our news online? 5 years? 10?
What’s your take? Join the conversation and tell us if we’ll ever see a world without printed newspapers or magazines, or will there always be a hard copy consumer?

