No more nitty-gritty - 15 Feb 2010

The focus these days seems to be solely on digital with innovations springing up every so often. The geniuses behind this technology seem to be always providing us with something bigger, better, but most of all...faster. The speed of internet access will eventually become far more convenient than stepping outside to purchase a newspaper or magazine. Sitting in front of my laptop, should disaster strike somewhere across the world, I won't have to wait till the evening's newspapers are circulated to read about it or wait for the prime time news. What's more, with the mobility of the internet on mobile phones, one can access info on just about anything from just about anywhere in the world.

We're living in an extremely fast-paced society where the last hour's news becomes stale in the next - our attention spans have become so limited that we naturally skim for the important bits, the nitty-gritty has become irrelevant. Some say the feel of a book or magazine in your hands feels authentic and comforting, but there is a generation inching its way into adulthood that feels like a cell phone is a natural extension of their body. This is the generation that will one day be running the world, and this is the generation that will see in the death of print. When you walk into a library and see more computers than books, you will know that time has arrived.

For now WAN-IFRA and the rest of the world's print press bodies engage in conference upon conference on how they too can benefit from the digital age. Rupert Murdoch has a few tricks up his sleeve, but I hope the same can be said for the rest of the print media industry for the time is nigh.