The young are busy and mobile. They like their media with attitude and lots of point-of-view … Interactive media, from Nintendo to computer games to call-in talk shows – even channel zapping – is not a futuristic notion but the only kind of media they know, the kind they patronize and expect.
Predictor: Katz, Jon
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 essay for Wired magazine, Jon Katz, the media critic for New York Magazine and a former executive producer for CBS News, discusses the future of newspapers in an Internet age. Katz writes:”The newspaper industry’s relentless alienation of the young is the corporate equivalent of a scandal. Big-city papers have almost no young staffers, now that it takes years to work through elaborate hiring structures and rigorous trials to get to urban metro desks. In addition, papers have trashed almost every significant part of youth culture for decades – from rock to radio to TV to rap and videogames – portraying each as stupid, violence-inducing, and dangerous. Hackers were mostly portrayed as weirdos while newspapers dozed through the arrival of another new medium that the nerds were piecing together in basements and bedrooms. Newspaper publishers then hold regular conventions at which they wring their hands in bewilderment at the loss of younger readers and despair even more at those lost advertising dollars. Kids’ tastes are no great mystery, not to cable TV or to a whole new generation of magazines. The young are busy and mobile. They like their media with attitude and lots of point-of-view. They especially like media that is full of informality and self-mockery – the much reviled ‘Beavis & Butt-head’ being a classic example. Interactive media, from Nintendo to computer games to call-in talk shows – even channel zapping – is not a futuristic notion but the only kind of media they know, the kind they patronize and expect.”
Biography:Jon Katz was a 1990s technology columnist/journalist who wrote for Wired, Slashdot, HotWired and Rolling Stone. Part of his career was spent as a reporter and editor for the Boston Globe and Washington Post and as a producer for the CBS Morning News. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Newspapers
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Online or Not, Newspapers Suck: How Can Any Industry Which Regularly Pulls Doonesbury Strips for Being Too Controversial Possibly Hope to Survive Online?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.09/news.suck_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney