I think this is right on the money. With Weblogs and RSS, it’s easily possible to create your own “News service” using only a palmpilot (I’ve been doing it for the last year on the way to work. I download all my RSS feeds – around 40 – and read the content on the bus)
But the spontaneity of buying a newspaper is something very important to consider. It’s not a question of web-savvy-ness, or having the right styling for the physical reader; Most of what people are buying with a newspaper purchase is the opportunity to get a bunch of news, without effort or planning. You don’t have to plan a long string of information gathering phone calls to your contacts for the weather, sports scores, nightlife info, etc. You don’t have to sort through a bunch of stories you’re overhearing on the bus. And you definitely don’t have to carry something around with you, and remember it every day.
So what if there was a solution that was a little more simple.
What if you picked up a “newspaper” at a news stand, the same way you always do. Except this one is “Printed” on a durable sheet of tyvek, or e-paper, or some as-yet undiscovered plastic stuff. Now, when you are done reading the news, you drop off the piece of “paper” at a receptacle or another news stand. There. Solved. Obviously it’s not that easy.
I propose that the challenge here isn’t to design a new reader for the news – that’s been done, and is realatively simple with the right flexible screen, OLed’s and whatever other tech-goodies you can squeeze into it.
The trick here is to develop the system by which the paper gets used and re-used, without eliminating the spontaneous, and carefree treatment of the news-storage object.
If you try to make a news reader which is designed to be kept with you at all times, I think that the first “innovations” of the new reader will be lower and lower cost, to the point where the reader is de-facto disposable, even though it may have a much higher cost of energy to make, and chemical waste than paper would have. Look at what has happened to cellphones – don’t you think that the newsreader companies would like to get a fashion cycle going with their readers?
I think some re-use, or re-introduction of old newspaper parts back into the system from the begining is the best way to combat this.