[MGP-Forum Announce] Sony starts selling the Soney eBook reader: $349.00

[tom stites]

> Subject: Re: [MGP-Forum Announce] Sony starts selling the Soney eBook reader:
> $349.00
> 
> they'll have to market to the over-50 crowd, the only group that
> really wants to read newspapers. everyone under 30 wants to see,
> hear, share, talk about, contribute to.......
 
I fear that the myth that young adults don't care to read could become true
if the people who produce journalism act is if it is true.  There is no
shortage of evidence that this is a myth; the Harris Poll, for example,
finds a significantly higher incidence of GenXers reading national
newspapers than in the general population.

Lots of well-educated people also say that poor people don't like to read,
but there's no shortage of evidence to the contrary on this point, as well.
For example, Wal-Mart is the fourth largest retailer of books, after
Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.  And sales of mass-market paperbacks
have been growing for years.

For decades well-educated people have also asserted that people won't read
long stories in newspapers, especially working class people.  But that's not
true either. Donald Barlett's and James B. Steele's Philadelphia Inquirer
series, "America: What Went Wrong?", consumed at least two full broadsheet
pages a day for a week and squarely addressed the issues of working people
-- the people who supposedly won't read long stories (or, more recently,
supposedly won't read at all).  When the Barlett-Steele series appeared the
Inquirer's circulation shot up by 15,000 a day.  When the paper made
reprints of the series available, the lines outside the Inquirer building
were so long the paper had to hire security guards to string velvet ropes to
keep the lines orderly.  The Inquirer couldn't produce the reprints fast
enough, and gave away more than 200,000 of them.  That was before the series
was repackaged as a book that went to No. 1 on the New York Times
best-seller list and sold more than 650,000 copies.  The average best-seller
sells a little over 100,000 copies, indicating that A:WWW? Spilled over from
the usual middle-class book-buying crowd into people who don't buy many
books -- the folks that the myth says won't read.

It's my deep belief that people of all ages and socioeconomic strata will
read eagerly if presented with articles that squarely address the issues
that affect them directly, articles that are meaningful and relevant to
their lives.  And there's plenty of evidence to support this belief.

The real problem is that very few news organizations publish articles for
readers other than the affluent, middle-aged readers their advertisers
crave.  This discarding of all but the affluent readers is a journalistic
disgrace and crisis of democracy.  The challenge facing us is to find ways
to bring quality journalism to everybody -- if we succeed, perhaps our
enfeebled democracy will regain some of its strength.

I addressed this topic more fully in my luncheon speech at the Media Giraffe
Summit in Amherst in July; the text is posted on the Center for Citizen
Journalism blog at 
http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democ
racys-critical-issue/ .

Tom Stites
Publisher, UU World magazine
Unitarian Universalist Association
25 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108
tstites at uua.org
617-948-6504
617-742-7025 (fax)

www.uuworld.org
www.uua.org