Comments on: Media Deconsolidation (Part 24): I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

By: Media Deconsolidation Part 24 I Read the News Today Oh Boy | Shed Kits

Media Deconsolidation Part 24 I Read the News Today Oh Boy | Shed Kits — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:08:19 +0000

[...] Media Deconsolidation Part 24 I Read the News Today Oh Boy Posted by root 18 hours ago (http://techliberation.com) The media industries have shed more than 30000 jobs in 2008 your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator adam i think it important to remember that when cars replaced horses the buggy manufacturers didn 39 t all become car manufacturers powered by wor Discuss | Bury | News | media deconsolidation part 24 i read the news today oh boy [...]

By: Helen Atwood

Helen Atwood — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:34:22 +0000

your blog is awsome

By: Radar detectors

Radar detectors — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:56:45 +0000

Very informative in depth knowledge giving article, I liked it a lot, you are in my rss now, keep going this way! Thanks.

By: Elsie M Aiken

Elsie M Aiken — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 07:11:27 +0000

Excellent, entertaining, useful reading, Thanks !!

By: Steve R.

Steve R. — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:54:37 +0000

The demise of the media business seems to be a hot topic, can't even escape it during the lunch hour. CNBC Video Media Buying Binge

By: Steve R.

Steve R. — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:21:01 +0000

Yet another article from the NY Times Where Is the Expedia of Local News?

With the big players dying, who will take their place?
Saul Hansell writes "Indeed, the bad news for anyone who actually likes reading about where they live is that no one seems to be able to develop an online version of the local paper–including local papers."

By: Tim Lee

Tim Lee — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:22:34 +0000

Adam, I think it's important to remember that when cars replaced horses, the buggy manufacturers didn't all become car manufacturers. Most of them simply went out of business. The reason wasn't that the people running the buggy industry were incompetent or short-sighted, it was simply that buggy companies, as institutions, were not well-suited for manufacturing automobiles.

I suspect the same is true of a lot of "old media" institutions. The optimal media organization in the 20th century was huge and monolithic. Because printing and distribution were centralized and had massive economies of scale, it made sense to have newspapers with hundreds of reporters and thousands of support staff. Now, with the means of distribution radically decentralized, that organizational scheme just doesn't make sense any more. The optimal size for the typical media organization is an order of magnitude smaller than it was last century. And so organizations that were organized around reporting staffs in the hundreds are going to face relentless pressure to downsize. Some of them will disappear entirely. Some of them will undergo radical reorganizations and emerge from bankruptcy as dramatically smaller, leaner organizations. And some may successfully navigate the transition.

But it's a mistake to equate the health of last century's dominant media firms with the health of journalism as an enterprise. The collapse of big companies like the Tribune Company doesn't necessarily mean there will be fewer professional reporters in the future. Rather, what we're likely to see—what we're seeing already—is a proliferation of new business models for news gathering and dissemination. A big chunk of my income over the last year has come from online news sources like Ars Technica and Techdirt. Ars recently hired Julian as a full-time reporter and editor. And I've got numerous friends working for other web-based publications with a dizzying array of business models and editorial.

Now, this is admittedly disconcerting if you're used to a world in which a single organization like the New York Times was in charge of dispatching reporters to collect "all the news that's fit to print." And of course it's wrenching for those reporters who worked at a major newspaper and are now facing layoffs.

But in fact, there's every reason to think that the forces of spontaneous order will work here as well as it does in other markets. If there are readers who want to read about something, chances are there will also be people who want to write about it. If there's a large number of readers interested in a given subject, someone will find a way to make a living writing about that subject. Markets and spontaneous order work.

I can't tell you exactly how any particular sector of the news business will work just as I can't tell you exactly which farmers will grow the food you'll eat next year. But I'm pretty darn sure that thanks to the magic of spontaneous order, there will be food on the shelves when you go to the grocery store. And by the same token, I'm pretty confident that when you fire up your browser next year, there will continue to be plenty of high quality news and entertainment available.