End of the News Romantics

For those brought up in the pre-digital era it's easy to lament the switch from prized paper to touchscreen ubiquity. But, in the first of a series about innovation, Andrew Marr says the future will be truly liberating for those who want to keep up with events.

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An unwieldy, arthritic and entirely unlikely hummingbird, I have been hovering on the cusp - on the luscious cusp, that is, of leaving the old news system and joining the new.

I am on the edge of replacing paper newspapers with electronic versions for my iPad and phone; of accepting that I hardly ever wait for a conventional news bulletin; and of actually reading full-length books, with pleasure, as downloads.

If that's the case for me, almost 51 and a slow adopter, it's happening everywhere.

I felt I was the last of the news romantics, only at home with a mound of coffee-stained newsprint, always on the sofa for the Ten O'Clock bulletin.

Now "they" have got me - the shaven pated, T-shirted, Maori-tattooed gauleiters of the digital future. So far, so banal. In a recent piece in the Guardian, Clay Shirky, an American writer says: "In one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds."

That's not quite true.

Newspaper and media use is as sticky and slow to change, as illogically romantic, as our habits in eating or dress.

Visit 'BBC News Magazine' to read the full story.