If newspapers think today looks bleak ...

Joshua Benton writes in NiemanJournalismLab:

I gave a talk to a high school in Toledo on Friday, which gave me a chance to do some ad hoc focus-grouping of how teenagers engage with media. (To put the demographics in perspective, this is a private school that, beyond some scholarship kids, is mostly upper-middle class and up.) We covered a lot of interesting ground: They don't care much about blogs or Twitter, for instance, and they get more news from The Daily Show and Colbert than anywhere else.

But the most surprising topic we covered was Facebook. Well, it wasn't a surprise to learn they live on Facebook; the consensus was that they spent about 60-90 minutes each night on the site, not counting the midday checks at computers in the school library or on their phones. These kids (there were about 80 or so) are smack in the middle of the Facebook demo. But here's what surprised me:

I asked them what they would do if Facebook announced tomorrow that it now cost $10 a month. Not one teen was willing to pay.

The rest of the post and the comments are interesting ... and disconcerting, especially if you happen to make a living stringing one word after the other.