“ The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die. It’s a scary thought, especially if you’re personally attached to an old medium like movies, books, records, or newspapers. But just because an industry is socially worthy, it doesn’t follow that it is commercially viable. Today, besides newspapers, three other media are thrashing over their futures in a networked world, and as with newspapers, the rhetoric is mostly of the nonproductive “But I like it!” and “It’s good for society!” variety, with not enough thought given to whether these media are commercially viable in the Internet age.
March 11, 2009
