If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods.
Howard Kurtz, media columnist for the Washington Post (whose parent company also owns Newsweek), in response to an encounter with “a smug graduate student [who] said, ‘I get everything I need from YouTube. What are you going to do about it?’ “
Kurtz’s elegy for his colleagues who took the buyout at the newspaper is touching, but his anger towards videogame consoles and iPods seems misplaced. People have always had a choice about how they spend their leisure time, and increasingly, nightly news broadcasts and daily newspapers no longer fit the pace at which younger people live their lives. Will we lose something as the regional monopoly that was the local newspaper continues to be disintermediated by cable news, ESPN, Craigslist, blogs and the Associated Press? Absolutely. But to the extent that time spent with an Xbox or a Wii is a problem for our fifth estate, it’s a symptom. Mistaking it for the disease may make for a good soundbite, but let’s not mistake it for anything approaching meaningful analysis.
