From the opening scene of Blade Runner, you know you are in for a more personally challenging vision of the future. Harrison Ford’s monologue interposed with messages from oversized personal billboards (“a new life awaits you…”) still come to memory first for me even after all these years. Visually alluring ads clash with the degraded city. 

I find myself coming back to those ads and scenes since returning from this year’s NTC. When I have mentioned the conference and its emphasis on new Internet social media, one way folks bring it home is by asking, so tell me, are newspapers dead.

They are not dead, but they are on life support. News readers and RSS feeds are killing them. It’s become easier and easier to create a customized daily (hourly) news service with headlines and stories from the sources that matter most to you. Having tried a number of different options, these days I use Google’s news reader. Since I’m using a version of Google as my home page, it’s a natural fit. I subscribe to a couple dozen sources from Business Week and the New York Times to various political and technology web sites to blogs of interest. It’s all there when I want to catch up. Another painless way to go is to install an add-on to Firefox.  

Even with all this, I still prefer reading news on paper, from a newspaper or magazine. The computer screen is convenient, but not as human-scale as paper.

That said, new devices are killing newspapers too. Around a luncheon table at the NTC, I got to try out an Amazon Kindle. Unlike reading stuff on a computer, the Kindle screen looks and interacts with your eyes like reading on paper.  On the Kindle’s large paperback book sized screen, there’s no glare and the words appear as on paper. You can purchase and download a book on demand for $9.95 and you can subscribe to newpapers and magazines there.

Over time, I would expect that the combination of portable devices like the Kindle (and more options are on their way) and personalized news will grow in appeal. Already on the subway into town, more people read the free daily newspapers (they get me from my home stop to about half way downtown) or listening to audio players (music or podcasts?). Reading news on a cell phone screen is hard, but the portable devices like the Kindle will change that.  

But to get back to Blade Runner, the main thing that is killing newspapers is loss of ads. Personalized billboards depending on implanted identifier chips aren’t here yet. But on-line personalized ads are here. And quite relevant given the pervasiveness of today’s on-line experience, which the 1982 Blade Runner could not anticipate (much less Philip Dick in 1966). I hear one side of the story from my sister who has worked for years in news and magazine production in New York. I hear another from my daughter Lisa working for the start-up Rubicon Project which hopes to turn on-line advertising upside down and work better for smaller companies and organizations.  

No print ads, no newspaper and very thin magazines.  So maybe when the second edition Kindle or other things come out, and prices drop, we’ll all see each other reading or listening to our personalized news o them on the train.

All this not only makes your news source choices much more complicated, but also makes your organization or business’ communication planning much more complicated.  More on that another time.