The production model of broadcast was stretched by the introduction of television, but not into places where it didn’t belong. You “cant” watch TV and drive.

The business model of producer/consumer was not put at risk through the introduction of the already defunct VCR, DVDs, CDs and their players.

But the introduction of the CD recorder and the DVD recorder started to enable media shifting,

The arrival of broadband has put on life support all of the other media which relied on the producer/consumer economic models.

The disintermediation of intellectual property from its expression in some form of protectable product is half of he problem facing traditional media.

The possibility of maintaining a conversation with anyone, any group, over the entire planet for essentially nothing, the rise of so-called social media, is the other problem facing the traditional media.

That feature is the one that is effectively “pulling the plug” on Gran’ma Media.

And, while they try to sue their own consumers into submission, to conquer he first problem, they have nothing to say about the second, because there is nothing they CAN say.

Marx would be so proud.

The means of production are now affordable enough to be owned and controlled by the workers.

And it all happened because a whole bunch of people saw a buck to be made selling prosumer toys to all those people.

At some point, the production quality became “good enough” and all of that babble broke out of the tower.

But it exists to cover local kids in their sporting and educational endeavors, births, deaths, marriages, local clubs (gardening, book club, etc), and local history, etc. These small papers are going to have to go local to survive. They are doing a very bad job at covering national issues, and are frequently blatantly partisan. If they didn’t do that, then the local advertisers would not pay for them, and they certainly cannot get more money out of subscribers. Most newspapers in the country serve communities that are too small to really support critical investigative journalism because they also depend too much on the advertising moneys of the very businesses and institutions they should investigate. And don’t get me started on local government….

Blaming the Internet—the Internet just reinforced the lazy ethos, as scribes in the newsroom started to cull blogs rather than stay in people’s faces. But the best blogs are the ones that actually make phone calls and appointments–just like the best scribes—and offer insight when they aggregate rather than just aggregate alone.

Radio didn’t go away when tv came along–it morphed into something more precious, and found its niche, especially in automobiles. But the newspaper people–it’s like a bunch of people showed up with pea-shooters at the castle, and the people in the castle not only surrendered, they devoted the next decade to intensive pea-shooter research and development themselves. They went overboard.

I’m going to shut up and let the teacher fantasize on about revenue and expenditure figures.

I’ll be salting the rest of the students with some questions to ask him.

Then I’ll take notes, smile quietly at myself … and pass.