Seeing the future of the media

What will be the future of the media? As someone who works for a publisher that creates magazines, audio CDs, podcasts, videos, websites and many other products, I clearly have more than a passing interest in the subject.

Will newspapers die out? What about magazines? Will we do all our reading on iPads or other mobile devices?

The past doesn't really help us here. There were media that seemed threatened but survived. Cinema and radio are good examples. On the other hand, audio and video cassettes did more or less die out.

For a bit of fun, I took a mental snapshot of the current media situation while sitting on a train in Munich last week as we waited at a station (Laim, if you really want to know).

I noted (on my iPhone) the media usage of the 14 people I could see without moving. Ten were in the train and four were sitting on a bench on the platform. With myself as the 15th person, these were the results:

• 6 daily newspapers, none of them "freebies" (unlike in London, where almost everyone reads the free Metro)
• 2 iPhones
• 1 monthly magazine
• 1 iPad
• 1 iPod
• 1 BlackBerry

A couple of people, including myself, were reading newspapers while operating an iPhone or Blackberry. Five people were doing nothing but staring into thin air or playing with their fingers.

The man next to me was reading Die Welt on an iPad. It took a few minutes to load the edition, during which time I had read three or four articles from The Times (whose website is now behind a paywall).

But when Die Welt was loaded, it looked beautiful on the iPad, which offers a very enjoyable reading experience even for longer texts. I started to get iPad envy.

I wish I had taken a similar mental picture ten years ago. And I would like to take one again ten years from now. But at the moment, nobody can be sure what it would look like.