TV and the Death of Old Media: In 10 Steps

Just because the train wreck hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it going to. Back in the late 1990s the TV industry pondered predictions that the Internet would eat the TV industry and spit out the bones. There were a number of things the Internet was going to consume.

It included all media:

• Newspapers and magazines
• The music industry
• Television  and video products

So let’s examine the decline of newspapers and magazines and see what it tells us about the destiny of TV. There are ten steps to the decline and fall of old media:

1. The emergence of a new mode of distribution. In the case of newspapers, this was news web sites and news aggregators, and later, blogs. You go to an aggregator like, say, Newsvine or Google News or Reddit, to read headlines and select the news or news analysis you want. You read the articles one by one at a variety of other web sites. The “newspaper” no longer exists.
2. Enhancement of the new mode of distribution. Initially dial-up was a gating factor to consumer use of the Internet. The Internet was not “always on.” Eventually broadband changed this removing a mild bottleneck problem in respect of news sites and aggregators. Money poured in to drive up bandwidth (although not always profitably.)
3. The emergence of “a new profession”. Journalists and bloggers are different beasts. Many bloggers are not journalists, have never been journalists and may never become journalists. They are a new profession that is more along the lines of a columnist. Some are amateur and some surprisingly talented. The barriers to entry into “providing copy” have reduced to almost zero. Anyone can try to become a blogger.
4. The emergence of a new packaging of the unit product. Sites such as specialist news sources and blogs sprang up and they packaged the news differently. They do not necessarily publish daily or even regularly. They focus on one area of the news, say the news about soccer or science or whatever. They are more like magazines, but they do not get read like magazines, because 90% of the readership comes through search engines or aggregator sites.
5. The emergence of a new business model and market. The business model for both the aggregators and the providers is based on advertising and affiliation. There is no pay-per item method of monetization. It’s a tough business to survive in.
6. The emergence of disruptive business models. Severe disruption to newspaper revenues comes from Craig’s List, which does nothing but adverts and charges nothing for most of them. It has scooped up the lion’s share of the small ads business, much to the detriment of local newspapers.
7. The decline of the old packaging. The old packaging of the unit product is no longer expected or experienced. By cherry-picking what to read from various web sites, the Internet news reader accepts sources from different countries (with different rules of spelling and different punctuation). There is no house style or standard length to articles, or standard typography or look and feel. The reader accepts that.
8. The decline of the old mode of distribution. Over 50% of Americans use the web as their primary source of news. This has led to people ceasing to buy the “dead tree” version of the news. This decline has a consequence. The simple fact is that there are economies of scale in distributing the dead-tree-news. As the scale declines this mode of distribution becomes unsustainable and eventually the newspaper dies. That’s what happening in the US now, with one or two newspapers living on as web sites.
9. The gradual defection of talent to the new profession. Journalists have become bloggers either officially or unofficially, depending on circumstance. Some journalists are indeed very good writers and hence they realize that they need to plow their own furrow.
10. The decline of the old business model and market. Newspapers and magazines now need a web presence as a matter of necessity. But with the passage of time they run into the problem that their normal mode of business and economic structure simply doesn’t fit a web operation. They are over-staffed and the cost base is too high.

Now let’s consider these same ten steps in respect of TV and video.