John Naughton's speech to the Society of Editors conference last week has reprinted in The Observer as Young people don't like us. Who can blame them? It's a corker:
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.
It's not only an accurate view of the way things are in many media businesses, it's also a roadmap as to where they should be...
Hold on tough surely the established media has a different role to play? Don't people buy print for something different and if it all becomes the same then why not just unplug your brain after you hit 19?