A comment about format and print going away, something that many journals are struggling with – there are many people that will not read the news online, and the people that online newspapers may want to attract may be these same people. They have supported newspapers in the past and do so today. These people, if journals are any indication, are not interested in the latest and most functional online property. They only want the straight content. If younger people are the ones that appreciate the interactive and linked content online but are not accessing it, then online newspapers are in a very sticky position. Two groups, neither if which is happy with what newspapers are doing.

A note on the minuses: I subscribe to the NYT online and read it fairly closely as soon as I open email; two days later, the Seattle Times has some of the same articles in print. Drives me crazy. I’d much prefer local content.

I am, in fact, LOGGED IN in the tab to the left of this one … this page opened from that tab where I was fixing my typos … and yet WP doesn’t know that I’m me (hence the lack of image beside my name) because FF is WONKY. Still. I don’t have this problem on the PC.

Am I the ONLY person having this problem on a Mac? Sheesh.

Despite my initial yelp about how many young folk didn’t get any news “yesterday” … I’m not going to freak out until I can put that data point into perspective.

Be care with all that “on demand” stuff … y’all will sound spoiled and self-centered!

The big whoppers, for me, that you’ve brought up are:

1) the changing news audience (young people not getting news at all), and
2) the current financial state of the world

I’m actually less worried about number 2, probably in part because I know less about what’s going on than you do, but also because I know many major newspaper corporations have their fingers in magazines and other areas of publishing that aren’t suffering the way newspapers are.

I also think that number one is 70% a distribution problem and only 30% a content problem. Most young people (and I am guessing based on my own experience here) are probably skipping the news mostly because it doesn’t come to them in the format that they want.

I like to refer to my generation and those that come after me as the “on-demand” generation, which basically means we are content snobs. We want our TV tivoed, we want our movies from Netflix, our music on iPods, and damnit, we want our news to be on our phones.

I think if newspapers can figure out how to put the content in the right places, the audience will grow again.

At any rate, I’ll definitely be at MindCamp, and would love to continue the conversation there ;)

Thank you so much for coming to speak – I know you have a busy week/end, and your knowledge and your contributions were invaluable.