That’s right, they’re not being developed for you, and you probably won’t use them anyway. You’re not a quick adapter, because YOU ARE TOO OLD.

That, at least, is a slight exaggeration of the message from Nokia, the world’s largest portable telephone manufacturer, delivered by Executive Vice President Anssi Vanjoki to a World Association of Newspapers conference in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this month.

Adults use mobile telephones to make their lives easier. Kids just want to have fun.

"Older people use mobile phones for efficiency. Have you ever heard a young person talk about efficiency? It’s not their concept," said Mr Vanjoki. "For young people, it is more about excitement and fun. They develop incredible uses for these devices. They play with them."

And Nokia and other telephone manufacturers are providing the toys. And even if you don’t use the new services, you’re going to want to know about them. Because they are going to have very serious implications for media businesses.

Mr Vanjoki says that everything that can be digitalised will be digitalised and it will all be offered through mobile telephones, which he likes to call "media terminals."

Music. Sports. Traffic Updates. Movies. News alerts. Imagine walking into a store and having a discount coupon appear in your portable (it knows where you are).

In fact, much of it is already happening.

Mr Vanjoki’s keynote address to the WAN Young Reader Conference in Helsinki struck a cord with the newspaper industry audience, which included over 300 publishers, chief editors, marketers and young reader experts from 47 countries.

Mobile telephones seemed to enter nearly every presentation.

"If we want to reach young people, we have to reach them as they want us to reach them," said Eivind Thomsen, Vice President of Norwegian-based Schibsted and President of the International Newspaper Marketing Association.

In addition to owning the biggest newspapers in Norway and Sweden, Schibsted also owns free-circulation newspapers in Switzerland, Spain and France and offers a mobile phone service with news messaging - all aimed at the youth market.

"I think it would be wrong to consider the issue of young readers without considering the issue of mobile communications," says Jim Chisholm, Strategy Advisor to the World Association of Newspapers.

He said mobile telephones eliminate a major disadvantage of the internet that is perhaps the key reason it may never reach the potential predicted for it - it is relatively desk-bound.

Mr Chisholm has studied the potential of mobile telephones for the news business and reported his findings in "The Distribution Revolution", a strategy report for the Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project, which examines and analyses all new developments in the newspaper industry.

The report examines the potential that new technologies and processes such as digital printing, personalised newspapers and mobile devices provide for newspapers. Mr Chisholm is currently working on a second report, "The Mobile Opportunity," based on a WAN study tour to Telenor, the giant Norway-based telecommunications company (for more about the SFN project, visit www.futureofthenewspaper.com).

But perhaps nobody in the news business has done more with mobile telephones than the Asahi Shimbun, which is Japan’s - and therefore the world’s - second largest newspaper. It started delivering news through mobiles in 1999.

"The mobile phone in Japan is not primarily just for phone calls, but it is used also for mail and web access, taking pictures, as well as schedule maintenance," said Takashi Ishioka, Project Manager for the Asahi Shimbun Electronic Media and Broadcasting Division.

With a daily circulation of 12 million, you wouldn’t think Asahi would be worried about circulation declines. But they are inevitable because of competition from new media, says Mr Ishioka. Asahi Shimbun has adopted a strategy of providing news and other services by mobile telephones, in the hope that it will drive users to the newspaper.

"We know that we are unable to change the lifestyle of our readers. So our approach is to familiarize users with news contents via mobile phones, with the final goal of actual newspaper subscription, which is more profitable," he says.

To attract as many users as possible to the phone service, Asahi adopted a strategy of low price - the equivalent of 73 euro cents per month.

"There are merits in this approach," says Mr Ishioka. That might be the understatement of the decade: the services have more than 1.2 million subscribers. "Our company was able to make profit via the mobile phone business in Japan," he said.

What they get is this: news alerts and more, particularly sports, because news is not enough. And now, thanks to 3rd generation telephones, streaming videos as well - news images are broadcast three times a day.

Forty percent of the users don’t subscribe to the newspaper, and the primary strategy remains trying to get them to subscribe to the paper. The company makes it easy to subscribe to the paper through the mobile phone.

"With these approaches, mobile phone users with interest in news can order the newspaper very easily from their phone, and then be able to read the newspaper at home the next day," says Mr Ishioka. "This has resulted in a total of 6,700 subscriptions via mobile phones from August 1999 through July 2003."

Next WAN event: The World Forum on Newspaper Strategy, 25-26 September, Gressy France. For more information, click here.

The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 72 national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives in 100 countries, 13 news agencies and nine regional and world-wide press groups.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 7, rue Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, 75005 Paris, France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr.