Doctor, doctor.

Newspapers are in the midst of a shift that has transformed them from a mass medium to a niche product, and the advent of more sophisticated e-readers will further accelerate that migration.
Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst with Outsell Inc. and author of the book “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get,” told News & Tech columnist Doug Page in a Press Room podcast posted March 6, 2010, “Publishers are fully embracing the idea that it’s digital first and that print is now a niche.
“Newspapers have always been a mass medium even though there might have been some niches. Now newspapers are the niche, the Starbucks buy. If you are a baby boomer and are willing to spend twice as much as you did even two years ago (to buy a paper) you can still read your paper.”
Doctor, a former editor at the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press and a Knight Ridder Digital executive, said the emergence of Apple Computer Inc.’s iPad “has the potential of changing the news reading experience exponentially and could further move people away from print.”
“It may return the day of the pleasurable reading experience,” Doctor said of the gadget. “We all use desktops and laptops, but they are essentially work devices. You can find news from anywhere in the world, but that is a (version) 1.0 experience. With the iPad, you control the experience, so it returns the notion of reading for pleasure, and that’s one of the main reasons people like reading newspapers.”