Collaboratively sourced media. Infiltrated by, well, collaborationists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_journalism

An example from South Korea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OhmyNews

Hijack the modding/reputation system of a large crowdsourced online news server, and you can downmod the unfavorable-to-your-agenda points of view out of most people's radars.

Alternative : why not just publish 'free news' to be handed out and media hubs... that's all people want - an occasion to look busy and occupy their mind...

'Truth Today' could play a major in the pre-occupation stages...

"Dinner is ready when the smoke alarm goes off."
This applies here more than anywhere else.

Add affordable 3d printing and other at-home manufacturing technologies into our kitchen, and we're ready for some difficult-to-predict snacks. :D

As Douglas Adams said, the trouble with the future is that we already have the ingredients but we don't know what we're cooking.

Which is nice for sitting at a table, or showing photos on a wall, but less usable for on-the-move reading in a subway or tram or train when having to stand.

There are different projectors under development, that project directly to the user's retina. Such augmented reality glasses are a nice alternative. There are first AR-based applications for cellphones. Addition of see-through wearable displays is then just an incremental enhancement. Not sure how practical for reading newspapers on the go, but, if combined with control by eye movements and eyeblinks, could be even comfortable.

...or even miniature projector technology combined with motion sensing, so you could turn any surface into a large touchscreen.

The Morph is a beautiful concept! Some of the technologies are already in lab test or even prototype stages; stretchable electronics, organic semiconductors, superhydrophobic surfaces...

The intermediate solution may be a roll-out display, integrated to the side of the phone. Or a pocket-sized wand with a roll-out display and a wireless link with the phone, where the display acts just as a dumb terminal.
A Philips example here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQMBzXaCmqY

There are already lots of devices that can be easily programmed in the way you suggest, support open standards and have excellent screens too. The problem is that phones almost totally dominate the mobile world and they are too physically small to replace books and newspapers IMHO.

An ideal reader screen would be A5 or A4 size but a typical phone is much much smaller.

Maybe there's a space for physically larger dedicated readers. There was an interesting concept phone video produced for Nokia which would actually combine small screen with large screen through a foldable paper-like material that could be worn like a bangle and then unfolded as required:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX-gTobCJHs

I agree. The main issue here are the attempts to control both the reader hardware and the content by a single subject and exclude other subjects. Once these two functions are separated, open formats are agreed upon and sales APIs are established (I expect the standardization being more difficult to achieve than the technology itself), there will be some actual competition on both ends of the market and the prices will go down. (For the low-end crap, at least. That may even become semidisposable. I can imagine a 2000-page sales catalog being cheaper to produce as a single-sheet touch-sensitive e-paper with a printed thin-film battery, allowing direct orders via generating cellphone-scannable QR-codes.)

I personally am waiting for a reader that is inexpensive, fairly rugged, handles open formats (HTML, PDF) in an easy way, and its connectivity is via wifi or, even better for on-the-go use, over Bluetooth using the user's cellphone data plan, allows bookmarking several pages from one or more books for quick flipping between (like tabbed browsing), and can be used for taking notes. And, if possible, can be easily programmed (maybe Android-based?). Could be useful for upkeep of machinery documentation on factory floors, too.

Yeah, mobile phones really took off once they were available cheaply and without a contract. As you say, at the moment e-readers are very expensive and things like Kindle involve an agreement with a single service provider.

Amazon seems to be suffering from the same problem as many large US tech companies, being deluded enough to think they can control everything. It's totally counter-productive in the long term.

For example the PC compatible standard would never have survived this long without the cheap non-IBM clones. DOS/Windows became a standard on the back of that openness, if MS had tried to control the hardware (like Apple did) then Windows would have got nowhere.

Full agreement on all counts. The e-readers as of now are still more a novelty; expensive, slow refresh, and the CPUs are underpowered.

For the reality, it is difficult to do even mid-range predictions. In case of e-paper devices, the major turning point will be widescale commercialization of reel-to-reel embossing/printing of flexible displays. I have no idea when it happens.

Reel-to-reel production is generally a holy grail for making anything from solar cells to OLED light panels to displays to printable electronics. Once mastered, the cost per unit produced goes DOWN and once it is cheap, if it is desirable it gets ubiquitous fairly fast.

(As a bonus, we will be delighted with large dancing animated billboards, way cheaper than today's LED arrays and therefore omnipresent and spewing their merry advertising everywhere. Hopefully they'll be hackable.)

Thomas you're absolutely right that mobile phones took over very quickly, but there were sales figures to show this happening as it did so.

So far e-reader sales have been pretty dismal, there's no clear evidence that they can take over from printed material. They get a lot of hype, but not many people actually buy e-readers, and even those that buy them don't necessarily use them.

BUT... all that is real world stuff. We're not in the real world in films. :)

If we're dealing with fiction then your idea is very VERY interesting, and I'd even suggest it could be the basis of a film in itself.

And even in the real world one day e-readers will be so cheap that they might indeed take over like you suggest.

The shift of the culture without cellphones to one for almost everybody happened in a relatively short time as well. Taking over the media does not have to be absolute; just enough to secure sufficient public support and marginalize the dissenters. Economical and convenience factors can take care of this market shift.

I actually did not consider large-scale history changes; people would remember and disbelieve. Just some subtle changes of key news items in the archives, in the last few years when e-newspapers started dominating dead-tree ones. A comparison of an old newspaper found somewhere with its parallel and now altered e-archive version may then prove that something wrong did happen. ("See? I remembered it right, the computer is wrong!")

I tend to agree with Kris that the shift is not going to happen that fast, but it would be really cool if it did for Iron Sky. That way the moon nazis could alter history writing over night and try to make it look like they are coming back to free the planet from the tyranny of the current regimes. Lots of potential there. When I think about this more, I think it could even be a movie on all by itself. And also sounds like something for the Griffin production maybe. Cool idea in any case!

"Shift from printed publications to e-paper readers is going to happen in next couple years. "

I don't think it will happen like that in the real world (notice the way Amazon refuses to publish Kindle sales figures?), but in a film who knows... :)

Begging your pardon,
but this will 'never' happen because New's prime directive is objectivity and verifiability and nothing is easier to verify than a hard copy...

Unless... the Moon Nazis were behind such a plan -