Een revolutionair nieuw product! De krant

Ken Paulson is een belangrijke meneer in krantenland. Hij is momenteel onder meer werkzaam bij Newseum.

Op het blog Newspaperproject (over de toekomst van kranten) stuitte ik op een verwijzing naar een speech van Paulson, met de titel Newspapers are Fact-Checked, Hand-Delivered, No Pop-up Ads. What’s Not to Love? Het is een vermakelijk pleidooi voor de krant als bron van informatie, waarin Paulson het geintje van Steven Johnson, over boeken en games, vertaalt naar kranten. “Stel je voor”, schrijft Paulson, “dat Gutenberg niet de drukpers had uitgevonden maar de modem, en dat wij informatie nu al eeuwen tot ons nemen via internet. Stel je vervolgens een persconferentie voor over een intrigerend nieuw product: de krant.”

We’re pleased to announce a new product that will revolutionize the way you access information. It will save you time and money and keep you better informed than ever before.

Just consider the hours you’ve spent on the internet looking for information of interest to you. We’ve hired specialists who live and work in your hometown to cull information sources and provide a daily report tailored to your community, your friends and your neighbors.

We also know that you sometimes wonder whether you can trust the information you see online. We plan to introduce a painstaking new process called ‘fact-checking’ in which we actually verify the information before we pass it along to you.

In addition to saving time online, you’ll also save money. You won’t need those expensive color ink cartridges or reams of paper because information will be printed out for you in full color every day.

You’ll also save money on access charges and those unpleasant fights over who gets time on the computer because this product will be physically delivered to your home at the same time each day, for less than what you would tip the guy from Pizza Hut.

You worry about your kids stumbling across porn on the internet, but this product is pre-screened and guaranteed suitable for the whole family.

And in a security breakthrough, we guarantee newspapers to be absolutely virus-free, and promise the elimination of those annoying pop-up ads.

It’s also the most portable product in the world, and doesn’t require batteries or electricity. And when the flight attendant tells you to turn off your electronic devices, you can actually turn this on, opening page after page without worrying about interfering with the plane’s radar.

To top it all off, you don’t need a long-term warranty or service protection program. If you’re not happy with this product on any day, we’ll redesign it and bring you a new one the next day.”

I can see the headlines now: “Cutting-edge newspapers threaten Google’s survival.”

Het blijft leuk om de dingen eens om te draaien.

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