“Post och Inrikes Tidningar” (PoIT), the world’s oldest current newspaper has discontinued its print edition as of January 1, 2007 and is now an Internet-only edition at PoIT.org. Established in 1645 as the official newspaper of Sweden’s national government, it had lost a lot of readers in recent years, according to Der Spiegel (in German).
Near the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish Queen Christina and Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna wanted to use PoIT to explain to its people “what all the money was spent on”. Over the centuries it turned from an outlet for the government’s official view into a full blown newspaper with reports on epidemics, the exchange rate for Swedish currency, weather reports, poetry and novels, and then was mostly focused on being “the country’s official notification body for announcements like bankruptcy declarations or auctions” (from the Wikipedia entry). The last print edition on December 29, 2006, was published with a circulation of only about 1,500.
Rather than viewing it as another proof point for the decline of print media, I’d say in this case the glass is half full. The Internet is a godsend for these types of official notification publications: the official function works just as well online. But it costs less public money.
(Disclaimer: I don’t speak Swedish; my only sources were Spiegel Online and Wikipedia)
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And so it begins. I expect 2007 will be the year we start to see a fair number of print publications like this one go online-only. I wonder what the first major North American news source will be.
Well, Canada’s “official newspaper”, the Canada Gazette is currently published in three versions: the official print and PDF editions and the unofficial HTML version. Maybe one will go at some point? Although, choice is good, and if the print version is basically a print-on-demand version, then it isn’t bad.