The End of the Middlemen (i.e., Newspapers and TV Networks)

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  DonaldWD07/02/08 Report as spam
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  Aging audiences = declinging revenues

  It seems that traditional media and the advertising community had better a find a way to start measuring something other than age.

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  danogram07/02/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The End of the Middlemen (i.e., Newspapers and TV Networks)

  Well, I wouldn't throw commercial radio into the junk heap, yet. With Limbaugh's reported Clear Channel and Premier contracts totaling $400 million dollars, I sense that ancient vehicle will continue to have a place in media for some years to come. It became mobile many decades before Ipods and Blackberry's were even science fiction. The auto industry has added lots of nifty gadgets in recent years, but I haven't noticed any trend to eliminate good old fashion AM/FM from the mix. Nor have I noticed many large contracts for removal of receivers one finds almost everywhere one goes.
  
  While technology has suffered repeated blows upon newspaper organizations, it's difficult to understand resistance to technological advances as a strategy to stem the bloodletting. To the extent that newspapers have embraced new technology and successfully adapted their historic ???middleman??? role, they have begun to understand that ???news??? will still have to come from somewhere. The infrastructure to gather, organize and disseminate the news has value.
  
  What the news industry in general has been slow to recognize is how far out of touch they have become over the years. As Americans' choices have mushroomed, they have increasingly demonstrated preference for alternative sources. What has become popularly known as ???Main Stream Media??? has repeatedly violated the trust of its once captive audiences, apparently due in large part to agenda bias imposed by the few who dominated MSM content. Too often that bias has been seen as contrived and contrary to the views of the audience, especially as American audiences have been able to obtain information which increasingly highlights that bias.
  
  As the MSM, including newspaper organizations, continue to adapt their strengths to the evolving technologies, they must confront these biases frankly and aggressively; unless they can purge themselves of anti-American agendas, no amount of adaptation will save them.
  
  Disintermediation will work when applied by those in the industry who are humble enough to understand why the likes of Predictify.com works.

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  Moose Wiener07/04/08 Report as spam
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  RE: The End of the Middlemen (i.e., Newspapers and TV Networks)

  The data about loss of valuation and increase in audience age is very powerful. My father, who is eighty, has subscribed to the NY Times his entire adult life, and just canceled it last week...he is now downloading his favorite columnists and forgoing the rest...though I think the first Sunday that The Times does not come he may go into withdrawal.