How Long Before “New” Media Becomes “Old”?

This morning began with an experiment.

Rather than pick up my daily newspaper, flip on the radio or even look at the television, I decided to get all my news solely from my iPad.

photo: David Byrd

It was different…and honestly, not very satisfying.

For example, browsing through Google News there were at least a dozen different reports on Microsoft’s impending purchase of Skype – a story that broke too late for newspapers but surely would have been on the radio – but not a single preview of today’s Senate hearing on mobile phone privacy.  I skimmed through Twitter and found it long on opinion and short on news.  It was still too early for most of my Facebook friends to have shared any current stories that interested them (but did catch some funny dog videos) so I scanned the websites of several news sources I trust.

All the reports in print were no doubt there online – assuming I had the patience to thumb through them all.  But after five or six headline links, my eyes started to glaze.  Headlines began to blur into each other and within 10 minutes or so I simply gave up, left to hunt out that morning’s paper edition of the Washington Post.  Newsprint in hand, in just a few minutes I learned about the current U.S. Congressional debt ceiling debate, the outing of a CIA station chief in Pakistan (and who might be responsible), a closed-circuit TV news program in local prisons, and a few other items I never would have found on the Internet.

Old-fashioned?  Perhaps.  But it turns out I’m not alone. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not yet clear whether the iPad will become the next hot ‘must-have’ gadget or just another flash in the digital pan. But this much is certain: it’s now at the center of a heated national debate – one that involves technology, responsibility, and President Barack Obama.

VOA’s Doug Bernard has more here.