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.
