Danny Whatmough.com

Oh dear.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged €600m (£565m) to help the country’s troubled newspaper industry. Ok, not too bad, news in certainly important.

But, he goes further….

He had added that he will give every teenager a free, one-year, state-subsidised subscription to a daily newspaper of their choice, as an 18th birthday cadeau.

Non? Oui. His words:

“The habit of reading a daily paper takes root at a very young age.”

Ok, so just forget about all the issues surrounding free press etc. etc. for a moment. I can understand the need to preserve the media. If state aid is the way to do this then fine. But why encourage youngsters down the route that will get media companies into the same situation again. As the lovely Guardian says:

“Sarkozy said he would increase sales points, loosen rules and pump aid into distributing papers to readers’ front doors. The number one problem is the cost of printing in France, with printworks tightly controlled by the communist union, Le Livre, which has rigid hours and protections. Sarkozy said the state would support negotiations with printers’ unions to reduce the costs by 30-40%.”

Ok, so printing is a problem. Ummmm…. Hmmm….. I wonder what could solve that?

This Week in Tech had an interesting discussion this week. They were reporting on a story from Business Insider which claimed that it costs the New York Times twice as much to print and deliver the paper each year than it would cost the paper to send each of its subscribers a free Amazon Kindle [with which they could read the digital edition].

They estimate that to print and deliver the NYT, it costs $644 million per year! Ouch!

So M. Président, by all means bail out the media companies. But put in place a caveat that they need to start investing in the modern day infrastructure that means they can start running a well-oiled business that is fully self-sufficient and realises when to change, move on and develop its ways.

Don’t believe me? Read what other [younger] people think (courtesy of the lovely Guardian again).

Ça va?

[Few caveats: I've never tried an electronic book reader thingy, I've never seen a Kindle in real life]

Amazon has proudly announced Kindle 2.0 – the electronic book reader which allows you to read books without carrying them all around etc. etc.

But I just don’t really get the appeal. Surely it is just a matter of time until one of the big players puts the ability to read books like this onto an iPhone or equivalent device? Why would I want to pay $300+ to buy something like this this when it could be integrated?

Ok, ok, I hear your shouting – the iPhone is too small, not enough battery and doesn’t have the nicely designed screen that makes reading easy…

I say: all problems that can be overcome.

So come on Amazon, Apple, Nokia, Microsoft – let’s sort it out! There’s surely money to be made… (& I don’t want yet another device I have to carry around with me.