Re:You Can’t Sell News by the Slice
by electromagnetic on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @03:30PM
(#475882)
I'm seeing a lot of people making the judgmental mistake of thinking that news is simply read on paper because no one has established a sufficient way of accessing it online. I'm sorry but this is just a fallacy, until I can read my news at the kitchen table, on the sofa and on the toilet then newspaper still has a significant use.
I mean it's a quite dismal future, if everyone gets up in the morning and sits in front of a computer eating their cereal so they can read the news.
News, and likewise information, will become ever increasingly available. The first publicly available newspapers were government-published tablets posted in public places by Julius Caesar, the Chinese circulated news to court officials in the 8th century.
Eventually news will become more accessible through digital media, but this isn't going to happen anytime soon. Portable devices aren't ubiquitous enough yet and so news isn't freely available enough on digital media to take over the ultimately portable disposable newspaper. I can take a newspaper, read it at breakfast, on the toilet, on the bus, at work and then when I'm done with it I can discard it. Until I can do all the same, except discard it, with a digital device then the newspapers won't be destroyed, they'll merely recede.
Newspapers are going to suffer more from attrition than an assault. There's so many people who've read their news from a paper every morning, that's a habit that is largely unbreakable. You can't stop a 60 year old picking up a news paper. My father's in his 50's, has worked in IT since the beginning yet he still sits down with a newspaper. Newspapers won't die until their readership does. This gives the newspapers a long time to adapt to current technology and establish a brand amongst the younger age group in a fashion that allegories the elder age group.
The other assumption people make, is that news will become more refined and from local sources. This assumption is quite laughable, local sources are increasingly irrelevant. Yes it's good to get the news from your home town, however do you really think that matters anymore? I live in Canada, so why do I care about Obama in the US or Brown in the UK? Because they both affect me. I've been to a dozen countries and I know people from even more and this is becoming the norm in our current era of civilization. The whole notion of globalization dictates that we're going to begin caring about world events more and more as they increasingly affect us. Just look at the economic crisis, the US fudged the brownie, but it's affected nearly every country and person on the planet, so why wouldn't people be paying attention to news like that?
I mean it's a quite dismal future, if everyone gets up in the morning and sits in front of a computer eating their cereal so they can read the news.
News, and likewise information, will become ever increasingly available. The first publicly available newspapers were government-published tablets posted in public places by Julius Caesar, the Chinese circulated news to court officials in the 8th century.
Eventually news will become more accessible through digital media, but this isn't going to happen anytime soon. Portable devices aren't ubiquitous enough yet and so news isn't freely available enough on digital media to take over the ultimately portable disposable newspaper. I can take a newspaper, read it at breakfast, on the toilet, on the bus, at work and then when I'm done with it I can discard it. Until I can do all the same, except discard it, with a digital device then the newspapers won't be destroyed, they'll merely recede.
Newspapers are going to suffer more from attrition than an assault. There's so many people who've read their news from a paper every morning, that's a habit that is largely unbreakable. You can't stop a 60 year old picking up a news paper. My father's in his 50's, has worked in IT since the beginning yet he still sits down with a newspaper. Newspapers won't die until their readership does. This gives the newspapers a long time to adapt to current technology and establish a brand amongst the younger age group in a fashion that allegories the elder age group.
The other assumption people make, is that news will become more refined and from local sources. This assumption is quite laughable, local sources are increasingly irrelevant. Yes it's good to get the news from your home town, however do you really think that matters anymore? I live in Canada, so why do I care about Obama in the US or Brown in the UK? Because they both affect me. I've been to a dozen countries and I know people from even more and this is becoming the norm in our current era of civilization. The whole notion of globalization dictates that we're going to begin caring about world events more and more as they increasingly affect us. Just look at the economic crisis, the US fudged the brownie, but it's affected nearly every country and person on the planet, so why wouldn't people be paying attention to news like that?