Durante toda a semana que hoje termina, o Los Angeles Times (LAT) alimentou na rubrica Dust-Up da sua página de opinião um debate sobre o presente e futuro dos media. Foram protagonistas Glenn Reynolds, criador do instapundit.com e Robert McChesney, presidente e co-fundador de Free Press.

Ficam aqui os tópicos do debate e respectiva apresentação pelo LAT:

• Media blitzed – Are the U.S. news media getting better or worse? (May 7)
• Can you teach an old media new tricks? – Do traditional media provide any value that can’t be replaced by citizen journalists? (May,8)
• Where’s the paper? – What will be the first major American city without a daily newspaper? Will it matter? (May 9)
• Is the FCC DOA? – Is there any role for the Federal Communications Commission in the 21st century?  (May 10)
• Media monoliths muddying markets? – How consolidated are the mainstream media? Does it matter that a handful of companies own large shares of the markets for TV, radio and print news? (May 11).

Ecrã dominará na leitura , prevê Gates

“Reading is going to go completely online. We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads in the online reading are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. Today, for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print. As the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

Bill Gates, na Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit online advertising conference in Seattle (cf. nesta peça, as opiniões do homem da Microsoft sbre a TV, a imprensa e a publicidade).