Wired‘s Adam Penenberg‘s Media Hack column this week is about the future of print media and electronic media, and how the rise of the latter seems to correlate with the decline of the former. My favorite bit is the results of the Washington Post‘s study regarding the decline in their subscriber base: it’s because younger readers don’t like newspapers piling up in their house.
Adam set up a great little e-mail-based focus group that included me, Patrick Reed, Max Fenton, John Athayde, and Christine Samson. (Christine’s thoughts were left on the cutting room floor, but she did buy a house a few days ago, so I suspect that her mind is elsewhere.) It was an interesting discussion. Adam took some of the key points and extracted them for use in the piece, which summed things up well.
After leaving Forbes, going out on a rockstar note with the geek community, Adam didn’t return to digital media until he started up with his Wired column a few months ago. As perhaps the best barometer of the timeliness, thoughtfulness, and relevance of his writings, I’ll warrant that over half of his pieces have been featured on the front page of Slashdot, prompting not the harsh criticism that usually results from exposure to that group, but, instead, thoughtful discussion and further analysis. And that’s really saying something.