At one time, the thought was that the daily printed daily newspaper would be around as long as Baby Boomers are around.
But industry experts say the tablet reader -- theApple iPad and its ilk -- may indeed attract enough Baby Boomer readers as to help render the printed paper to dinosaur status at some point.
Newspapers for years have been trying to handle their dual personalities of in-print and on-line.
With the advent of the internet, they started shoveling their news content onto the new fangled world wide web, not charging for the same content they were charging for in the printed papers they distributed each day.
This split personality of content distribution has worked for some, not so well for others as more and more papers are putting their online content behind a paywall.
All along, newspaper publishers hoped that the reading habits of Baby Boomers would carry their printed product forward.
Baby Boomers grew up in households that received at least one daily newspaper, and there’s a better than even chance they developed a daily newspaper reading habit themselves.
Then along came the iPad. And now there are a dizzying array of reading tablets that make it easy to access newspaper content in an easy-to-read, high resolution format that often includes bonus content of audio and video.
Ken Paulson, president of the American Society of News Editors, is quoted in a recent American Journalism Review story that he used to think that newspapers would exist only as long as the baby boomers were around. But the tablet changed his expectation.
"Newspapers will never die," Paulson said in the story. "They will just move to a new address."
Newspapers are trying to find a way to produce their newsroom content in a digital format that will earn them the eyeballs of readers and the revenue of those readers and advertisers.
ABI Research sees the trend leaning toward tablets.
“Media tablets are perceived to be easy to use, compared to the keyboard and mouse interface of a netbook computer,” said Jeff Orr, group director the mobile devices division at ABI Research, in a recent report on tablet sales.
“Those who have avoided PCs because they are difficult to use – think the Baby Boomer generation and older – see media tablets as an opportunity to re-engage with Internet access.”
And the Apple iPad is expected to dominate that market.
Apple will dominate Christmas sales of tablet computers, according to a forecast by researcher Gartner Inc. and cited in a Bloomberg report.
“Apple delivers a superior and unified user experience across its hardware, software and services,” Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, said in an e-mailed note today that was quoted by Bloomberg. “Unless competitors can respond with a similar approach, challenges to Apple’s position will be minimal.”
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