In October 2011 I spoke at an industry event in Vilnius, Lithuania. The paper went well, but I was not prepared for the barrage of press interviews that followed. Indeed one interview was conducted twice as the journalist had not mastered her iPhone recording app the first time.

I won’t post translations of all the articles as I tended to riff on the same themes. The journalists were (understandably) pushing hard on the future of print media. Indeed one asked outright if I thought she would have a job in five years time. The issue with embracing digital is, as they rightly highlighted, the challenges with monetising news content. People will happily pay a dollar or two for an episode of Big Bang Theory on iTunes, but seem to expect news and comment to be free, and of course advertising alone will not allow the quality that we have become accustomed to in the print era. An interesting dilemma…

I was sent a translation of the second article, headed ‘Media will rise like the Phoenix’. Here it is  The last interview on the right was conducted after about five hours of grilling and the heading picks up on the very last thing I said:  my concern that we would spend so much time staring at glowing rectangles of different sizes that our bodies would adapt. Hence the unfortunate headline…

Media expert: “I fear that people’s eyes will evolve bigger from watching TV while body will shrink”