Arab News: LONDON: On Aug. 24, Al-Riyadh, the Saudi daily, will stop its print edition after more than six decades of daily presence in the lives of Saudi and Arab readers. The newspaper will continue publishing digitally. The decision also applies to Al-Yamamah, the cultural and political magazine that predates Al-Riyadh by more than a decade.

The end of a newspaper’s print edition inevitably raises questions about the future of journalism. But we must first distinguish between two things: the end of a newspaper and the end of print. What is ending is the form in which we have become accustomed to receiving the newspaper each morning. Paper is leaving the scene, while the newspaper is attempting to begin a new life on digital platforms.

The growing number of newspapers abandoning print confirms that the economics of print journalism has reached a critical point — practically, a state of intensive care.

The reader who once waited for the newspaper each morning to discover what had happened in the world has changed. Today, news reaches readers before the newspaper has even opened its pages. Their phones tell them about events the moment they happen; social media platforms provide photographs, videos and comments; and news websites update their pages around the clock.

Readers no longer wait for the newspaper to tell them what happened because, in most cases, they already know.

Here lies a fundamental problem. The printed newspaper once possessed something rare: time. It had an entire day to gather news, verify it, organise it and analyse it before presenting it on its pages. Today, however, time has become the enemy of the news organisation. A story that waits until tomorrow may already be old, while readers accustomed to constant updates are unlikely to wait.

The paradox, however, is that this speed has not made the need for professional and responsible journalism any less important. If anything, it has made that need greater. In a world where information flows without interruption, the journalist’s role in verifying, filtering and interpreting information and placing events in context becomes more important than ever.

The problem is that the digital market has not succeeded in compensating traditional journalism for the economic model it has lost. And this brings us to the heart of the crisis.

The printed newspaper relied on two clear sources of revenue: circulation and advertising. Readers paid for the newspaper, while advertisers paid for access to its audience. In the digital world, however, a large proportion of news has become available for free, while a significant share of advertising expenditure has moved to major technology platforms capable of targeting and measuring audiences in ways that traditional journalism never could.

The problem, therefore, is no longer that newspapers cannot reach readers. On the contrary, they can reach more people digitally than was ever possible in the age of print. But visits do not necessarily translate into revenue. Followers do not necessarily become loyal readers. And wide reach does not mean that a media organization has the financial capacity to sustain a professional newsroom staffed by editors, correspondents, photographers, writers and investigative journalists.

This is why the belief that digital transformation alone would provide newspapers with a financial lifeline is proving to be a great illusion. Digital advertising revenues are modest compared with the traditional newspaper model, while much of the advertising market is controlled by technology giants and social media platforms that possess the data and the sophisticated tools for targeting audiences.

Add to this the culture of free content to which digital readers have become accustomed, and the difficulty many publishers have faced in building successful paid-subscription models, and it becomes clear that moving to digital does not, by itself, solve the economic crisis. It simply transfers the crisis into another form.

Professional journalism requires people to go where events happen, ask questions, verify information, examine documents, and produce investigations and analysis. These activities cannot be reduced to reproducing what is being said on social media. They are at the heart of journalism — and they come at a considerable cost.

The transition to digital, therefore, should not be merely a matter of replacing paper with a screen. The real challenge is to carry the newspaper’s journalistic value with it into the new environment.

This does not mean that a digital newspaper should simply be a replica of its printed predecessor on the internet. Digital journalism requires different tools: it must be faster in its response, multimedia in its presentation, and capable of using video, audio, data and interactive formats. But at the same time, it needs elements of traditional journalism that must never be abandoned: accuracy, verification, professionalism and the ability to explain.

If journalism loses these qualities, the problem will not be that paper has disappeared. The problem will be that journalism itself has disappeared.

We should therefore neither mourn the decline of paper excessively nor celebrate its disappearance. Nor should we uncritically celebrate the digital world. Paper was a remarkable medium that changed the world, preserved the memory of societies, and produced generations of readers, writers and journalists.

The printed newspaper still has its own particular magic: the feel of the paper, the smell of ink, the front page, and the experience of reading an article from beginning to end, away from the constant notifications of a mobile phone.

What we should fear losing is not paper, but journalism that is worthy of being read.

If media organizations can find a new economic model capable of financing professional journalism, build a direct and sustainable relationship with readers, restore the value of subscriptions and payment for quality content, and use technology and artificial intelligence without allowing either to replace journalistic judgment, then the transition to digital could become a new beginning rather than an ending.

On the editorial front, however, the picture can be equally troubling if journalism succumbs to what is known as the “attention economy,” in which users’ attention is treated as a commodity, and falls into the trap of clickbait.

When major newspapers — historically built on seriousness and depth — descend into this digital swamp in pursuit of views and advertising, they risk losing their essential identity. They cease to be institutions that inform, educate and scrutinize, and become little more than supplicants for clicks and likes, no different from passing entertainment pages.

In that race, fleeting news comes at the expense of certainty, thoughtful analysis, accuracy and reliable information.

Faced with this deadly double bind — in which print incurs enormous costs while digital struggles to provide genuine financial sustainability — institutional journalism finds itself at a crossroads that allows no easy solutions.

The survival of great media institutions may increasingly depend either on finding sustainable sources of institutional and public support, recognising them as strategic assets and instruments of cultural influence that cannot simply be left to the logic of commercial profit and loss, or on accepting their gradual decline and allowing the field to be occupied by individual content creators and global digital platforms.

The end of a newspaper’s print edition therefore forces us to confront a bitter truth: venerable media institutions must either find a way to preserve professional journalism beyond the narrow logic of commercial profit and loss, or they will inevitably move towards their final decline. The consequence could be a media landscape overwhelmed by a chaotic flow of fleeting information, with little protection from the standards of professionalism and credibility.

If the goal becomes simply to collect as many clicks as possible, chase every trend and recycle whatever the platforms are saying, then we will have won speed and lost journalism.

That is what makes the decision by any newspaper to end its print edition much more than a matter of the printing presses falling silent.

The question remains: Can journalism find a new life after paper? That is the real test.