Newspapers (among all the regurgitated PA and Reuters copy) have original writing.

In the UK, if you wanted the news you could look at the BBC website but if you wanted the gory details of some scandal you might read The Sun, or for some government disaster, The Mail.

Sports, Politics and Financial journalists all usually have interesting info or opinion that is unique to them or the paper they write for. Whether you end up reading that in their physical paper, their website, or syndicated to someone else’s paper or website doesn’t matter – it still can earn someone money and the newspaper’s role is to identify the good writers and get the best work out of them.

Much as we’d not like to admit it too, there’s the need (especially in bigger markets like here in the UK) to customise the news to suit the type of person you have – and this doesn’t mean filtering the articles like Google News does – it means actually writing the news differently (and you can’t get much more different than The Guardian and The Sun!). Until you can get a computer to understand and write stories, that customisation isn’t going to happen online soon.

Newspapers still have a long way to go before they fully utilise their original unique copy in the online world.

The other advantage I can think of in a physical newspaper is “discoverability”. What I mean is that a with a physical newspaper, you can easily come across a story you didn’t realise you had any interest in whatsoever by turning the page. Online, you’re less likely to discover a gem of a story accidentally.