Will your newspaper see you out? The tantalizing question follows publication of a ‘newspaper extinction timeline’ by Australian author and futurist Ross Dawson.

Dawson, who was a speaker at PANPA’s Future Forum earlier this year, has put his home country near the top of the list (with Hong Kong) as set to lost its print ditions by 2022.

First of course, it’s curtains for the USA (2017), the UK and Iceland (2019), Canada and Norway (2020) and Singapore and Greenland (2021).

Dawson sets the criteria on which his calculations are based at

http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2010/10/launch_of_newsp.html

And has already prompted lively debate on his website and elsewhere.

At WAN-Ifra’s Digital Media Asia event in Singapore this week, once the topic had been raised by Sutichai Yoon, founding editor-in-chief of Thailand’s ‘Nation’ everyone wanted to see how they were placed.

The end result is a bit like the world with global warming: I’ll be OK but things don’t look good for the kids. Dawson is somewhat younger than your GXpress scribe, but we reckon if he can’t make a living from newspapers, it should be good for sales of his book (e-reader downloads, that is).

Peter Coleman