For a long time I’ve thought that traditional media was heading toward collapse — at least as a business model, as in free enterprise. I’m far from the first person to point this out, but the ways in which traditional media have made money are going by the wayside.
Take the newspapers for example. They used to make a lot of money from classified ads. Now we have craigslist. They used to generate a lot of sales from the funny pages. Now I have bookmarks to my half dozen favorite comic strips online. Sports! But why would I buy a New York Times to read sports when ESPN.com is far larger and more interactive? Financial news? We have several better dedicated outlets for that too, not excluding the Wall Street Journal. Science? Was science reporting ever good in newspapers? Now we have science papers online — too many to skim in a thousand lifetimes, without the biased and ignorant reporting that often sensationalizes the worst research.
That leaves newspapers with local reporting and government reporting. I think that it’s no coincidence that government reporting has become more and more a matter of sucking up to powerful interests and creating views to satisfy particular interests and ideologies. Of course, online magazines and blogs better report on government too, and most people are starting to realize that. My personal hope is that we see a complete changing of the guard with the advent of new technology that gets applied to media. I suspect very strongly that we’ll see great niches for brilliant minds who won’t get bounced around between executives and talking heads.
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