The newspaper/print industry as a whole, is under increasing pressure. Recently, it was announced that three major print publications; Forbes, Business Week and Fortune magazine, are facing their demise.

I don’t need to go into detail about the specific factors that are causing this industry to collapse – there are plenty of sites that explain those reasons, but ultimately, we can blame the internet. We can blame the googlers, the tweeters, the bloggers and citizen journalists for replacing our traditional source of information.

But really.. do we need newspapers and magazines?

One reason, more overlooked than others, is the rise of mobile computing, netbooks, iPhones and mobile web-browsing. I can say, without any doubt in my mind, that I could live without ever looking at another newspaper again – whilst they may be nice on the Tube in the mornings, with my iPhone, I can very simply connect to my Google Reader account, and catch up on all the latest news via RSS feeds.

Google Reader is a god-send, and it will always remain one step ahead of newspapers. It is more up-to-date (it’s the internet, duh!), and most importantly – it is a hell of alot more relevant to me – I can scroll through headlines and pick & choose which articles I would like to read in more detail and at the end of the day, I will only get news that I subscribe to.

I can read news from a variety of sources, from blogs to major newspaper sources – some examples of publications that I am subscribed to include BBC News, Business Week, The Guardian, Time Magazine, HiphopDX, Forbes, Techcrunch, Engadget and Wired. So you can see that I can A) Get news from websites that I like, B) As a result of A, this news is more relevant to my interests and C) I can get a variety of news and updates that would not be possible from a single printed publication.

The only downsides is that getting updates is dependant on whether you get a good signal (no updates in the Underground), and as you choose which news sources to subscribe to, you may not get that odd, quirky article that The Metro occasionally might have. However, the first reason is not so important – a simple update before you pop into the Underground station will provide enough news for your journey and the variety of news can be remedied by subscribing to varied news sources.

As mobile computing rises, accessing news on-the-go becomes more convenient than ever… and it is just another factor that is killing off the print industry.

Convenience, relevance, ease of use and you save the environment (no paper!). It’s simple really.