Shall we similarly have sympathy for the "major demographic" has an attachment to MSIE-6.x... and protect them from needing to upgrade? Or is that an unfair comparison?
If you could go to a museum and view a five-hundred-year-old version of IE6, people might shed a lot more tears when the last copy was turned off.
Newspapers are one of our oldest media. There's an entire infrastructure of mythology built around them that will be difficult to replace overnight. That's one reason why everyone finds it so easy to make glib generalizations like "the death of newspapers will herald a big increase in corruption". This isn't a rational statement. [1] It's a statement of religious faith, akin to the belief that atheists can't make moral judgements because they don't go to church on a regular basis.
But, more charitably, and to return to your point: Yeah, we should have at least some sympathy for the people who don't know about Firefox, or can't use it for some reason. The prisoners of corporate IT are people, too. The people who can't understand their Windows box are people, too. And the folks who are losing their jobs in journalism and have no idea what to do next are in legitimate distress.
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[1] I mean, where's the controlled experiment? The last time a case of corruption happened in an era without newspapers was three hundred years ago. Unless you're a really well-read Latin student or a Renaissance historian, every case of corruption you've ever heard of happened in spite of the existence of newspapers.
Of course, if you hand-pick the data you can prove any point you like. There have certainly been many heroic acts of journalism. But there have also been many shameful acts of journalism, and one hell of a lot of mediocrity. I'd wager that for every great investigative journalist there have been a hundred mindless stenographers, several dozen shameless toadies, and at least one William Randolph Hearst. And that's without even getting into Pravda or (pace Godwin) Joseph Goebbels.
To be honest, the newspapers of yore are already dead. I do have nostalgia and a sense of wonder for the industry that ran full page broadsheet political cartoons, or Little Nemo in Dreamland, but those orgs are already long gone.
When society is involved, controlled experiments are impossible.
Take a look at the front page of a common "new media" blog: http://dailykos.com/
As of this moment, about 18 out of the 20 posts are using old media (almost always newspapers) as a source, with the bloggers' total contribution being opinion. Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters. There's a serious void threatening there.
Picture that same blog, and every other source of information on the web, without the dead tree reporters.
But this is like arguing that, if Internet Explorer stopped working tomorrow, 90% of web users would be out of commission for years. Whereas, in fact, if IE stopped working tomorrow there would be a brief panic for a day or two until the world's techies, armed with handfuls of installation media for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, filled in the gap. After which things would continue much as before. (Except that many websites would be cheaper to build and would work better. But let's not get into that. ;)
There would be several years of intense pain on the edges as various people and companies who have tied themselves too closely to the IE codebase scrambled to adapt to the new world. But in ten years nobody would even remember IE, just as few people today remember Lotus 1-2-3.
Of course today's blogs depend on dead-tree reporters. Dead-tree reporting is available in abundance -- indeed, in many niches there is a massive surplus of it -- because it is subsidized by steady outside sources of revenue derived (in part) from monopolies on local advertising. It was hard to compete against that subsidy, while it lasted. But that subsidy is smaller now, and shrinking. [1] And we just don't know what happens next.
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[1] Though, in fact, I don't think it is gone. The death of print media may be greatly exaggerated. It's hard to tell the difference between an extinction-level event and an event that will reduce the population by a mere 85% when you're in the middle of it. And simple mismanagement has a lot to do with the newspapers' current plight.
