Teenage Mutant Supreme Court Judges

The consultant specialized in young people and how to sell to them. He was funny and fast, and he impressed this audience of boomer-age publishers and media people. Don’t even talk about convergence, he told them; what else have kids ever known? He evoked that world where your kids Facebook their friends, Google the school assignment, download that Lost episode and rip the new tune from MySpace, all at the same time. When they want to. On their terms.

Copyright? Today’s kids admire creativity and creative people, he said, but in their hearts they believe in the One Device, a sleek thing coming to provide everything, and seamlessly. Their reaction would always be the same: “What do you mean, I can’t do what I want with this? I already paid for it.”

The presentation was terrific. But it’s not only kids thinking this way about new media. I considered the publishers of newspapers and periodicals right there in the room. In an age when periodicals...