Revolutionary

Old media is in danger of finding itself in the buggy whip business. I notice that virtually everything on the evening news broadcasts is already old news, and on the odd occasion when I pick up a newspaper, it's only a compilation of stale news and opinion columns that were on the web early that morning or the day before. Older people still read newspapers, but young people don't. Newspaper circulation figures are tanking, and so are revenues; one reason for the latter is that the classified ad business is rapidly disappearing to the Internet, especially the lucrative employment ads and real estate advertising. The revolutionary decentralization of information is for real, and it's accelerating. Old media has to figure out what its product is going to be in the future -- what, if anything, it can offer that people will be willing to pay for. Ten years from now, for example, it's hard to imagine that the networks will still be in the hard news business in any serious way (as opposed to feature story magazine shows like '60 Minutes'). This past year, it was somewhat shocking to see the networks cut back dramatically on one of their traditional mainstays, their coverage of the political conventions. Below from Wretchard at http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/ :

"People who had designed Adobe fonts and written desktop publishing programs knew the memos were computer generated and were not going to be overawed by Dan Rather's experts asserting the contrary. They were the real experts and to make an impact they did not have to be correct across a large range of issues. They only had to be right in the one thing they knew best and from that vantage could hammer a mainstream pundit into the dust. Rather's defeat at the hands of Buckhead was not accidental. It was inevitable.

"But the mainstream media could console itself in one thing. It still controlled the primary newsgathering apparatus. Yet even here the rulebook was changing. The advent of cheap consumer digital cameras capable of recording sound coupled to the proliferation of internet connections meant that in addition to the analysis cells which manifested themselves in 'instant punditry', the Internet was developing a sensory apparatus to match. To the 'instant pundit' was added the 'instant reporter' -- the man already on the spot, often possessed of local knowledge and language skills. These came suddenly of age with the December 2004 tsunami story. Survivors with a videocamera or even just an email or web browser connection 'filed stories' which were vacuumed up by the instant pundits hovering over their RSS subscriptions and launched into the global information pool...

"The real challenge facing traditional media is how to graft themselves onto this burgeoning evolutionary system by providing services to it. Google is possibly the best known example of a company which understood this trend perfectly, providing services to this growing organism and profiting from its expansion... Lastly, this emerging neural network of analysis cells and sensory apparatus is largely self-aware. It has developed meta-ideas about itself and can actually guide its own development..."