Old Media Reaches For An Inhaler

I've written often about what's wrong with the old media model, such as postings here, here, and here. I don't think they're listening to me.

Over at Bottom-up, Timothy B. Lee links to an excellent Clay Shirky post that gets to the root of the old media disconnect:

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.


To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.”

Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
When your basic premise is so detached from the reality of how people want to consume information, no amount of wishing or arm-twisting will save your business model.

My newspaper was late hitting the driveway this morning. I picked it up when I returned from driving my son to school, and it's laying on the kitchen island, still in its translucent orange bag. Since it didn't arrive in time for me to read it with my breakfast, I doubt that it will ever leave that bag until it arrives at the recycling facility.

Not surprisingly, I've been online since 8 AM and am significantly more informed as to what's happening in the world than I would have been had I read the paper in its entirety. How is old media going to fix that?