Why you can still sell newspapers
Talking to Sam earlier, she wondered why the Times Educational Supplement here in the UK can still sell newspapers every week. For Americans, non-teachers, and other aliens, everyone who buys the TES in the UK is a teacher, and the reason they buy it is because that’s where all the teacher jobs are advertised. The TES people might believe that everyone buys it for the quality journalism, but they’re kidding themselves; most (or possibly just some) of its readers do read the articles, but everyone buys it for the job ads. And all the jobs in the TES are also available online, for free. So why do people buy the newspaper?
There are three reasons why.
- It’s easy to read and understand a newspaper. Websites are more difficult to find things in. This is 30% of the reason.
- Newspapers are a lot more convenient; you can read them over breakfast, or roll them up and throw them in your bag, or read them on the train, and you can write on them, and take just the bit you want, and they never run out of batteries. This is another 30% of the reason.
- Newspapers aren’t a computer. Computers are basically bad things that annoy you and break a lot. Computers are not useful and not fun. This is the last 40%.
All the work that all the web people are doing goes to fix point 1 only. Point 2 may go away with magical new technology like RadioPaper or similar, but not for ages. Point 3 will go away twenty years from now when my daughters’ children don’t find computers weird. But remember when the next big web thing comes along — Ajax, Firefox, Opera Mini, CSS — that it’s only fixing a third of the problem.
Teachers aren’t smart enought to use a computer IMHO ?
11 hours later
Ade: I invite you to put that view next time you come round for dinner. :)
12 hours later
My girlfriend’s a teacher who is, of course, very much smart enough to use a computer. She’s also smart enough to use computers as little as possible - hence she *buys* the TES. She is very much a proponent of reason 3: “Computers are basically bad things that annoy you and break a lot. Computers are not useful and not fun.” Indeed.
3 days later
Does your daughter’s generation really find computers “weird”? I was at a conference today where it was pretty much agreed that they think of them as completely the norm, and find reading a newspaper every day rather weirder.
Which is precisely why this:
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,1734623,00.html
will die a horrible death, hopefully followed by the horrible death of its proprietor. (disclaimer: death wish used as rhetorical device only)
3 days later
[...] No, no they don’t. They let people like me (and doubtless you, gentle reader) read books on the train. They’re computers. Computers are not useful and not fun. People don’t want to read books on a screen, they don’t want to read one on a computer, they don’t want to think about computers when they’re reading. [...]
41 weeks later