Sunday, November 12, 2006

Newspaper journalists as pets

There's a good piece in the Observer today about the failure of newspaper editors (and others in the media industry) to realise that the reason young people don't buy many newspapers is not the fault of the young people.

"Now look round the average British newsroom. How many hacks have a Flickr account or a MySpace profile? How many sub-editors have ever uploaded a video to YouTube? How many editors have used BitTorrent? (How many know what BitTorrent is?)

And while some of our teenagers' interests coincide with ours, many do not. Here, for example, are the top blog tags on Technorati last night: Bush, careers, college, comedy, Congress, death, Democrats, elections, Flickr, gay, Halloween, Iraq, Microsoft, money, Republicans, Saddam, Ted Haggard, vote, war, breaking-news, tagshare, YouTube. Some you'll recognise. But you won't see much about many of these in the papers.

These are the future, my friends. They're here and living among us. They're not very interested in us, and I'm not sure I blame them. The best we can hope for is that one day they may keep us as pets."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was this by any chance a piece by John Naughton? He used to write fantastic tv reviews years ago ( for the Observer I think). His article was the first item I used to look for when I opened the newspaper.I was so sorry when he changed to write about IT. As IT doesn't really interest me I rarely bothered reading his articles but it seems he still has his finger on the pulse.

Richard Brown said...

Yep.... was indeed :-)