The Antique Media

Thomas Lifson in the American Thinker has a great piece which describes the changes in media over the last 50 years or so, and the way the emergence of the conservative media and internet websites have dramatically changed the way people get their news. You need to read the whole thing to get the complete picture, but here's an interesting excerpt:

Newspapers, of course, are in a death spiral, a case I made almost two years ago. The expense, time, and resources consumed in leveling forests to put ink on paper and transport heavy newspapers to readers’ hands are simply not sustainable when news consumers can look at their computer screens and find far more printed information, far more usefully displayed, at much lower cost.

Someday, people will regard the yellowing remnants of long gone daily newspapers as charming reminders of an era when production was much more costly, requiring much more labor and craftsmanship, and took much longer to accomplish. Antiques have great charm, and they embody nostalgia for bygone eras.

Those newspapers which survive will be analogous to knockoff Louis XIV chairs, produced with more modern technology by very different purveyors, serving very different markets than the original craftsmen who produced the genuine antiques.
Internet websites like blogs are an even deeper challenge to the antique media than Fox News Channel was to the antique networks. There are no serious barriers to entry for bloggers. The capital requirements are low to non-existent, and global distribution takes place with no pesky distributors, longshoremen, retailers, or other encumbering interests in the way.

Some day a new industrial structure will emerge for the internet-based media, but the shape and characteristics of that structure will remain unknowable for some time to come.

The antique media are run by bureaucracies. Their hierarchies check (edit) and make decisions based on a daily work cycle. After a certain number of hours, they go home, and re-start the cycle the following day.

The blogosphere is run by networks of like-minded people, who anxiously check and correct each others’ work on an ongoing basis. Call it peer review, call it “the wisdom of the many” or call it the contest of ideas. It is bracing, lightning fast, and cannot be equaled by any bureaucracy as a means of checking and improving information flow.

The blogosphere never sleeps. It works 24/7. An individual blogger may log off, and when he or she returns, find email and links criticizing what was previously posted. An immediate response, not defined by work hours or news cycles, is demanded. And usually happens. Or else the blogger loses audience to other entrants in the free-for-all marketplace of ideas.

America’s media will never be the same. It will take a long time for antique practices to die out, but die out they will. The antique media are on their way out.

Call them what they are.

The times they are a'changing...and the Times, they are quickly fading away.