Dan says....

Disclaimer - I'm an iPhone/iPad fanboy. I'm very open about it and my parents don't have an issue with it at all - this is the 21st century after all....

There is quite a lot of talk about the iPad being the saviour of the newspaper industry - I don't buy that for a minute.

I don't see the logic behind the reasoning the that iPad will suddenly change things for the newspaper industry. The problem with newspapers isn't the media they're distributed on - the problem isn't just that people stopped reading the newspapers (there are many people who still read newspaper websites), it's that people get their news from many other places, have many other things to take up their leisure time (social media) and are generally vastly more informed now.

Newspaper readers now get far more detailed information from far more places then previously. They get updates of where friends are from Twitter, how their kids are growing up from Flickr and where they work from LinkedIn. They don't rely on the local newspaper for all their local news - the newspaper is still (in many cases) the originator of local news but increasingly they are not the key distributor.

How will the iPad change this? It won't. It's a game changer, a pioneering electronic masterpiece that will go down in history as the device that changed the way we use the web but it won't save the newspapers.