According to one of the charts in "The State of the News Media, 2008" the cell phone is the moblie device which has the "biggest impact on user's lives." In terms of media coverage it seems to me that more specific then the cell phone, the blackberry has had an even greater impact on the distribution of the media to the public and a greater impact on "user's lives." According to a July 2006 study, "a significant number of young people (13%) say they get news via a cell phone, a personal digital assistant such as a PalmPilot or Blackberry, or an iPod or similar portable music player." I believe that this number has significantly increased in the last 2 years as more "young people" use Blackberrys (or IPhones) as their cellphones and therefor have the ability to read the news at the click of a button from almost everywhere (I for one have started to read both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal everyday since I got my Blackberry and never would have done so otherwise with this great regularity).
The fact that more people, and more specifically young people, are able to use mobile devices such as Blackberrys to access the news has both good and bad effects on the public. On the one hand, more people are reading the news with more regualrity which hopefually makes more of these people aware of the events in the surrounding world that they never would have known about before. On the other hand, this new tendency continues to hurt the newspaper business and has already threatened to shut down some of them (The New York Sun among others).
I don't know what the long term results of this change will be, but I am happy to find that atleast some positive things are coming out of what seems like a great annoyance to society with people constantly on the moblie phones and Blackberrys and disrupting so many of those around them.
5 comments:
do you think that this is a function of great accessibility or are those who have blackberrys more likely to read the news in the first place?
I think it has to do with both. I don't think anyone will disagree with the fact that the so called "businessman" (or woman) who gets a Blackberry from their office or for convenience are a population who are likely to read the newspaper anyway. However, I have observed (and am still looking for data to support this) that more younger people, and other people are less likely to read the news altogether, are reading the new much more often, and often times regularly, solely because they now have the news at their fingertips.
I think some of this is due to the shorter attention span of our generation and since a lot of people don't have the time or patience to sit down and read to newspaper its great that we have these devices that can give us news in these convenient doses. Although I think there is a danger to this because not everything can be shrunk down to blackberry size and people still need to be able to sit down and take in full articles from a variety of sources.
While I do enjoy keeping up with the latest gadgets, the blackberry is one that I'm still having trouble coming to grips with, especially when they're in the hands of my peers. To make the argument that they're vital in the workplace where emails and the like are being exchanged frequently and this device helps to stay on top of that is one thing. But to say that the purpose of these devices in the hands of teenagers and college students is to read the news is utterly ridiculous. Try picking up a newspaper. They're not heavy, or bulky and they make for a good read. And for those who have trouble taking in the news in heavy doses (whatever that means) (a) what better place to get news overload than the internet where the amount of it is infinite and (b) read the paper in half hour snippets over the course of the day.
Seth, I never said that there was an actual NEED for young people to have Blackberrys, I was simply observing that the fact that more people, and specifically young people, have Blackberrys the better I think it is for our nation and the circulation of the news. In addition, do you really see a difference between reading a newspaper (like the NYT) online or on paper? Many (if not most of time) times the articles are the exact same as they are on paper and are published online before they are published in hard copy.
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