Elitism as a solution?

Here’s a problem I’ve been dealing with more often as of late.

As a news organization we are constantly embracing fancy technologies to tell our stories and keep our business models in the black. If we want to increase circulation, we publish to the Kindle. When breaking news breaks, Twitter, Facebook and iPhone apps wait to instantly inform.

But what about the considerable percentage of people who barely understand computers, don’t want to understand Twitter and can’t afford an iPhone? It’s easy to assume that those people are so old or so poor that it doesn’t matter, but that’s not the case. There is always going to be poor people, and while it’s true that my generation and those below are born with a knowledge of texting abbreviations, that doesn’t always mean they want their news that way.

Mainstream media has always had a problem combating it’s own elitism – so can we really stake our future in developing for faster, flashier and more expensive technologies?

How about some thoughts from my audience.