Death of the newsboy

aka Where teens will get their news

In a section on User Generated Content, Bambi Francisco wrote that upwards of 75% of teens get their news from the Web, citing a study by Pew Internet and American Life. So she bets that "anyone under 10 years old will be receiving a lot of their news from News Corp's MySpace or Facebook, or some unlikely place, by the time they start caring about the news (italics mine)". She argues her point here.

Now looking back (more like a month ago), I kind of got that strange feeling here in Manila when one morning my 13 year-old son (who has a myspace account and counts as his friends Demetri Martin of "I've got 9000 friends" fame) asked me why we still got dailies tossed into the yard by the neighborhood newsboy. Then I said, well yes, we still needed to read the latest advertisments". Then again, I thought, perhaps we only needed the latest print ads on Saturdays. Bad for the newsboy.

Another casualty in the wake of the MySpace generation.