These are perilous times for traditional media.
Things are changing so rapidly that Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone predicts “there won’t be any newspapers in two years,” according to BusinessWeek magazine (Poynter.org, 4/27/10). Never one to resist a dig at rivals, the cantankerous Redstone says his rival Rupert Murdoch “lives in ink, and I live in movies and television. Ink is going to go away, and movies and television will be here forever, like me.”
If one thing is clear, however, there’s no such thing as forever when it comes to technology.
Consider that some 800,000 U.S. households cut the cord to cable and satellite TV in favor of such alternatives as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes in the past two years, according to the Convergence Consulting Group, which predicts the number to reach 1.6 million by the end of 2011. [TechCrunch, 4/13/10, http://tcrn.ch/cordcutters]
Last year, 12 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watched at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online; this year the number is 17 percent and next year it’s expected to be 21 percent. There are clearly changes in store for the $84 billion cable/satellite TV access industry, although there are forces at work to slow the progression of programming to the web (such as the $34 billion that cable companies paid last year in programming fees).
Meanwhile, newsprint, as Redstone gleefully noted, is fast dissolving into memory. Newspaper companies are falling into bankruptcy (13 major ones at last count), while commentators of all stripes welcome the destruction of old media fortresses; leftists slam them for their “reactionary” institutional and corporate bias and right-wingers for the perceived “liberalism” of their staff. The more politically agnostic simply feel newspapers just don’t “get it” — that is, they don’t know how to price their products correctly and stay ahead of technology. The current consensus of the technorati seems to be that online newspapers should be either free or, if they go to the paywall model, unbundle their content – following the Internet or Apple’s revolutionizing the music business.
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ADDENDUM: Happy to see that the NY Times paywall seems to be working … it would seem that some people ARE indeed willing to pay something for that priceless (yet costly to produce) product called journalism.
