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Cory Doctorow Calls Death To Music, Movies, Print
An anonymous reader writes "Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow depicts an unfortunate near-future for a handful of media industries being transformed or killed by the Internet. Predicting a large-scale transformation of the music, movie, book, and newspaper industry, Doctorow says, 'The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.' While the Internet has the potential to help the dying book industry, for example, Doctorow predicts the 'imminent collapse' of the American newspaper industry because advertisers are uninterested in spending money on the remaining offline readership, such as senior citizens, who prove less valuable."
Dunno if he was in Falujah or not.
The disruption that the Internet lowers the cost of having your voice heard to near zero. The newspaper's advantage isn't that they have reporters. The newspaper's advantage is that they have editors.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Actually I think it is pointing out a serious weakness that newspapers have had for a LONG time, and that is the lack of local journalism and the rehashing of old news. All the local papers that I have seen lately, both at the city and state level, have almost nothing to interest the local reader and instead just rehash the same old wire stories that everyone else does.
Now this could work in the days before the Internet simply because most of us didn't have access to the wire services so it was that or the 30 second soundbites on the evening news. Now we can get the wire services just as fast as they can, so by the time they have rehased it(while adding little to no value to the story themselves) it is old news and nobody cares. So to me this period is just separating the wheat from the chaff. The smart ones will hire good local reporters and advertise stories that are of interest to local citizens and will probably flourish, albeit with a smaller readership than before, but even that can be supplemented with a good online presence, while the ones that simply regurgitate what they get from AP will die out, and rightly so. This is simply the bad ones that have been coasting for far too long getting what has been coming for a long time now.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.