What Simon Dumenco lacks in tech savvy he makes up in relative prescience. There are a few issues media companies are dealing with now. There is a loss of ad revenue, competition from blogs, and, most importantly, falling circulation rates in communities that actually crave local news but don’t want to pay for it. There is a certain cohort of reader, however, that does not want to see the newspaper go away in its present form and there is a simple solution to their kvetching. Some folks expect the swift delivery of their news subscriptions in a format that is easily readable. While you could say “I thought that’s what the Internet is all about!” how are you going to convince a generation – folks in their thirties and beyond, for example – with the expectation that every morning a newspaper will be on the doorstep and a magazine will be in the mail to give that up and read their news on a screen?
By giving them a free e-reader.
Here’s Dumenco’s money shot:
In other words, hardware makers may have no choice but to turn their internet devices into multi-tier-subscription-based media machines, because there will never again be enough margin in the basic price of the hardware. And the more we get used to the idea of essentially subscribing to media as a way to pay for hardware … well, the more hope there is for media.
And this is abundantly true. If the NYT or Time Magazine or US Weekly creating something like the CrunchPad or the Kindle and gave it away to a certain percentage of subscribers, kind of like a cable box, with the understanding that they would need to subscribe to one or more magazines or newspapers on the web. The reader will be useless if you don’t subscribe to anything, obviously. You should also be able to recycle it easily it or send it back for a deposit refund. Think of it as the old timey beer growlers of media – you own it and it gets refilled down at the local content hole.
The current crop of netbooks won’t do the trick. I’m talking about a flat device with few buttons. It wakes up in the morning, charges via induction, and has great battery life. It needs to be color, sadly, for magazines like Vogue to jump on board and it would require a direct education for a mass of readers but it would be worth it. It would save paper, reduce the cost of distribution, and turn a mass of dead tree readers into screen readers.
Are you kidding me? How are you going to convince “folks in their 30s” to get their news from a screen?! Look, I know that the average age of narcissistic bloggers is around 12 or whatever, but you do realize that every one of those whiz kids that kicked off the “Web 2.0″ hype several years back, are now those old fogies “in their 30s and beyond” don’t you?
The whole “old folks just don’t get technology” might have been a valid story in the ’80s, but you need to update your assumptions for the new millennium. A 30-year-old today, has grown up their entire life with the personal computer. While 24-year-olds are dreaming of becoming the next internet famous blogger and twitterlebrity , those doddering old fools in their 30s are the ones programming the backends which make the blogs possible.
Seriously, people have been expecting and predicting the death of printed media since back in the days of Compuserve and the WELL. It isn’t some young whipper snapper thing that us old folks (in our 30s) don’t get. Get over yourself.
You could have just posted “Hey! I’m a guy in my 30s and I like the internet so everyone in their 30s must like the internet!”
I can’t believe I read that whole thing.
Sorry, I’ll try to keep my responses to fewer than 140 characters, for the young twits who get lost if a message is too long.
I can’t help it, I come from back in the stone age when we had an educational system.
I know it’s not the point of the article, but I have to comment :)
I’m only 24, but this is just priceless. Talk about being given a good talking to, or as is popular today – being pwned. Seriously, you got served, this is one of the better put downs I’ve read in a while :)
For me, the oldies category always started at 50+ and calling 30 somethings IT illiterate is just weird in my opinion.
I’m 34.
I’m 35. I like the internet.
I don’t feel old.
I kinda like this Dumenco’s idea.
A constantly updating New York Time e-reader.
Rolling Stone? Or Playboy?
Why stop with magazines and newspapers?
Wouldn’t it be cool if a record label did that?
Or a movie studio?
I’m 66 years young, have a blog, 3 computers, an iphone, and an ipod, am on Facebook and MySpace; and I read all my news on the net.
I’m also a big fan of Simon Dumenco!
“how are you going to convince a generation – folks in their thirties and beyond”
LL – he is referring to 30 and beyond.
We’re all very savvy, true. But there are enough people who just can’t give up the newspapers and magazines in tree form. I’m just saying give them an e-reader and solve the problem.
You make a good point, but it seems people have an issue with the line, “folks in their thirties and beyond”. I’m 34 and it certainly jumped out at me: WTF? I enjoy technology! :D
Then again you would have had only one comment at this point if you would have wrote, “folks in their sixties and beyond”. – With due respect to Countess Bedelia
I know I am going to get in big trouble for this, but here goes.
I understand exactly what he meant by “folks in their thirties and beyond”. I am 41 and I do see people of my age, and younger, struggling with ‘new technology’ such as the internet and mobile phones.
Maybe its different in the states where people may have had more money in the ’70’s and ’80’s, but here in the UK people didn’t have that much money for tech. We weren’t lucky enough to be able to afford ‘proper’ computers like the Apple II. No, we had to make do with stuff like the spectrum (timex in the states?) and other ‘toy’ computers, so many ‘older’ people just don’t get it. Why do you want to play with all these ‘toys’, why not stick to ‘proper’ things like paper and pens?
As for the ones who are even older (those who when I was young I thought were so old that they had once had dinosaurs for pets) some of them don’t get technology at all. There where many scare stories here when I was young about how computers were going to take over the world and they would make the decisions to put everyone out of work. These sort of stories have scared many older people. I even heard one old person say that they won’t use a computer because they get viruses and they don’t know if the flu jab would protect them.
So basically what I am trying to say after this long winded moan is younger people are much more tech savvy than older people. It is nearly impossible to explain to older people here that its not just birds that go ‘tweet’.
Lay off the young kid. He probably has only just learned how to change his nappy so doesn’t understand that back in the ’stone age’ this sort of ‘high tech’ wasn’t even thought of, let alone implemented.
Maybe after this post I should increase my fire insurance as protection against all the flames I am going to get.