Sam Zell Sees a PDF Newspaper Future

Posted on July 14, 2010

Reuters reports that Sam Zell, Chairman and Chief Executive of Tribune Company, see PDF replacing the home delivery of newspapers.

"Going forward it's going to require all kinds of different approaches, including, probably the most significant, the elimination of home delivery and the replacement of it with PDFs. The iPad is the real example of almost replicating a newspaper on an instrument. I think that is only the beginning of how that is all going to evolve."

Newspapers print will be replaced, but PDF does not seem like a good choice. People need to be able to search for what they want from newspapers on the Internet with a browser. Keeping the newspaper format the same and just dumping it out as a PDF file is not going to solve the problem. The content of a newspaper has to be broken apart to be useful with today's technology.