Week 1 - Newspapers

Fascinating topic. My conclusion after listening to all three parts of the discussion is to get rid of newspapers all together. Why try to stick with newspapers? I think there should be news companies, but what a waste of time, effort, money, environmental resources, etc.

The point about not having the media available to view the internet articles like a newspaper, although true at this point, does not phase me from a technology standpoint. I am assuming this lecture was made before the release of the ipad. I just see the computer screen being created on any surface in the future. Obviously this could be created with expensive touchscreen surfaces or something like this discussion from ted.com.

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

We will be reading news anywhere and everywhere.

As for the subscription debate, I think this cat and mouse game is going to take a long time to play out. You could argue that pirating music is on the same wavelength as getting free news via the internet. If it isn't profitable to gather the news and report it, we will lose many sources of news. Eventually someone will get a good business process in place to make money from people reading the news, but until then I think we will see these news sources continue to fall. From a marketing perspective, companies need to find the niche websites and areas where their customers are going to retrieve their news/information. Even if people aren't clicking on the ads, they see the information and might view the site at a later time.

Overall, if the average age of the newspaper reader is 55, we won't see as fast of a change to digital news in the US as we should because the population bubble is right at that age. Newspapers will go at the wayside, but I think it will be another 10 years unless something major happens (i.e. law passes to reduce paper usage, highly limiting newspaper distribution).