And Bill Gates says ...

Like the post about Sergey Brin just below, this snip of what Bill Gates thinks about the future of news comes from conversations at Davos, this one courtesy of Richard Sambrook, director of Global News at the BBC:

And [Gates] had a vision of the future of the media. For those of us involved in the many discussions about whether newspapers can survive online he believed online micropayments and the development of multiple ad markets would mean the businesses would survive. But more than that he believed technology would develop so that the convenience of online newspapers would "overwhelm print". And he was surprised that people had not recognised the huge revolution in TV that was about to break upon us. On-demand TV over the internet would provide huge choice and the end of the linear schedule with all of its inconvenience. TV online would open up creativity and the "long tail" of niche interest content. As it happens, I agree and have been saying so for some time. But strangely people seem more interested when it's Bill Gates saying it....

I think it's fair to note, in passing, that Bill Gates has been frequently and spectacularly wrong in his public predictions about technology and (especially) the internet.