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

Sat Sep 30 09:52:53 CDT 2006

The New York Times launched the beta of their portable
reader this week...check out what Jack Shafer said
about it in Slate

http://www.slate.com/id/2149888

The Los Angeles Times also launched a reader.  I'm
going to have to go thru my email to find the link
that explains both launches...if I can find it. I read
so much on this stuff that I tend to lose track of
links...

I have to agree with Tom, though,  about the myth that
young people *today* don't really want to read
newspapers--I was a young person in the early '80's. 
We were the most apathetic end of the baby boom,
rarely voting, never reading newspapers, etc. (I have
a high-school newspaper article from 1979 that decries
our apathy...it's an interesting time-piece) 

Many young people who hit high school and college in 
the post-Viet Nam war era didn't read newspapers,
weren't politically involved, and didn't care about
politics.  We didn't care about high school football
or homecoming dances either. There weren't huge groups
involved in campus democrat *or* republican groups.
The reason for this?  The big hippie party was
over--nothing to protest, nothing to fight *for* nor
fight *against.*  The war was over, Title IX had been
passed, and everybody was partying at Studio 54. 
There were the hippies and disco people to rebel
against though--and we had a great time doing that...
by being completely and utterly apathetic when it came
to the stuff our older brothers and sisters (not our
parents) said was incredibly important.

Think about it.

So, today's youth's disinterest in the news is
probably nothing really new when you measure it
against those of us who were non-geek, hip young
20-somethings in the 1980's and NOT against the Viet
Nam war generation.  (I wish I had the time to dig up
the stats for comparison...but that would take a grant
for research)

but I digress...   

That many young people today say they get their news
in electronic form is, perhaps, a huge leap from 20-or
so years ago.  

Yet when there is disinterest, it more than likely
comes from the news itself, not the way it is
delivered, being irrelavent to young people's
experience...which is the same as in the post-VN era. 
Should newspapers be running after youth with such
ferocity by offering more electronic bells and
whistles?  

Well if there are bells and whistles that don't offer
good information that people can trust and that is
relavent what's the point?  Should newspapers begin to
cater more towards young people's tastes?  Honestly,
that'd be just as foolish as directing a newspaper's
content--both online and off--to a certain
socio-economic group (as Tom has pointed out before.) 

Newspapers are more than youth entertainment devices. 
They serve a large sector of the populace, not just
the young, and will continue to fail if the
information is not accurate, trustworthy and relavent
to the world we all live in(as opposed to the world of
our specific age demographic, which we eventually
leave.)    

As for e-Books...I see them as an extension of audio
books--another medium. Not a bad thing, but not nec. a
complete replacement. I prefer old-fashioned dead-tree
medium for serious reading.  I wonder and worry about
what might happen somewhere down the line if something
happens where we do not have ready access to
electricity or the internet and both become too
costly.  Check out this piece in the NYTimes on how
difficult it is to access the internet in rural New
England, and Verizon's possible sale of telephone
lines if you think it's not possible:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/technology/28vermont.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1159627588-01TpSNG+xcXKLzvrN/QDRQ

believe it or not, in many rural W.Mass towns, it is
impossible to get either DSL or broadband.  If all
books become electronic, the access to knowledge and
information in rural areas could become very
difficult.  Think of the consequences to young people
growing up in those regions...

Perhaps it is best for us to always keep in mind there
are not only other age demographics out there besides
youth, but also that access to information, even in
this country, may be very unequal even today.

Tish G. 

--- tom stites <tstites at uua.org> wrote:

> > 
> > 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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