Are Papua New Guinea newspapers dying?

I was reading an interesting post by Erick Schonfield about the declining advertising in the Newspaper industry in the United States. Basically what was said was:

"Print advertising has been declining for ten straight quarters, but this marks only the second quarter that online advertising also went down. More concerning is that the overall rate of decline seems to be accelerating"

Based on these comments and statistics from the Newspaper Association of America I began to wounder is the newspaper industry in Papua New Guinea eventually going to die out because of the web? I for one believe not in the near future. The main reason being that there is a huge gap in the digital divide between developed nations like the United States and developing countries like my beloved home Papua New Guinea. My argument is best summed up in the words of a fellow Papua New Guinean Jeremy Ningiga in his Knol article on the digital divide:

"Currently ICT is making the gap worse in developing nations like P.N.G. The reason being is that until ITC becomes an affordable or free commodity for the nation’s poor the gap will continue to get worse. For example in P.N.G a minimum wage earner who earns 66.68 Kina (K) per week as stated on the Investment Promotion Authority of P.N.G (2007) website. When converted to the Australian dollar is $26.00 a week at an exchange rate of 1.00 Kina to $0.39 at per the Bank of South Pacific website exchange rates (2007). Now if you take in to consideration that standard dial up plan with a local ISP Daltron Ltd costs K45.00 for 10hours. It is not feasible for a minimum wage earner in a developing country to use the Internet let alone buy a computer, once you take living expense in to account."

Although the exchange rates used in the above article are out of date now. The general sentiment of the article is still the same. In Papua New Guinea currently not everyone can gain access to the web. To read up to the minute news articles, Blogs, Knols, etc. Until such time that this is possible all of our Papua New Guinean published newspapers are safe, from the web taking their ad revenue to the extent that it is not economically viable to run and print newspapers in Papua New Guinea. So the answer to the question "Are Papua New Guinea newspapers dying?" Not for now or the near future for that matter. I don't think they have to worry to much about the web stealing their thunder just yet.

Here is some food for thought, will the day come when online ad revenue in Papua New Guinea is large enough for a person to sustain his or herself financially, and to make a comfortable living from something like blogging about Papua New Guinea or Papua New Guinean issues? Who knows, only time will tell.