http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/media/30carr.html?_r=2&ref=business
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Calvinistic ideals are no match for macromedia economics that have vaporized significant components of the business model that drives traditional publishing. (((Translation: we're broke and we can't make anything pay. Merry Christmas, crisis world.)))
The most popular books of the holiday season have become cat toys in a price war between online and offline retailers. Newspapers still hang onto a portion of seasonal ads, but the retail chains that place them have consolidated into a much smaller cohort, and much of their spending is bifurcated between old and new media marketing. Magazines intended to help the reader primp for Christmas parties are, in many cases, half as big as they were just a few short years ago. (((Christmas parties are also half as big.)))
Pages are down, spending is down, revenues are down, and the biggest feature of this holiday season in the media kingdom has been layoffs and buyouts at Condé Nast, Time Inc., The Associated Press, and yes, The New York Times. (...)
That feeling of age, of a coming sunset, is tough to avoid in all corners of traditional publishing. Earlier in November, the New York comptroller said that employment in communications in New York had lost 60,000 jobs since 2000, a year when the media industry here seemed at the height of its powers. (((Where did they go, one wonders.)))
I arrived in New York that same year as part of Inside.com, a digital news site conceived to cover a media space that was converging and morphing into something wholly new. The site covered the mainstream media’s efforts to come to grips with new realities and efforts by new players to cash in on emerging technology.
Few of us could have conceived that in the next decade some of the reigning titans of media would be routed. Profligate dot-com ad money that had fattened print went away in a digital wipeout, and when digital media came back, it was to dine on the mainstream media rather than engorge it. After 2000, jobs in traditional media industries declined at a rate of about 2.5 percent annually and then went into a dive in 2008 or so. (Inside.com, an idea before its time — hey, let’s charge for high-quality, business-oriented content — disappeared after about 18 months.) (((Virtual media fails and dies even faster than analog media, a fact which seems to be massively under-emphasized.)))
That carnage has left behind an island of misfit toys, trains whose cabooses have square wheels and bird fish who are trying to swim in thin air. (((Nice metaphors, and scary to think how well they apply to industry and politics as well as media.))) The skills that once commanded $4 for every shiny word are far less valuable at a time when the supply of both editorial and advertising content more or less doubles every year.
Where do all the burgeoning pixels come from? Everywhere, and cheap at that. (((Explain to me why a gaseous flow of unedited pixels requires anything akin to a "medium." A platform, maybe, but a "medium"? A medium between what and what? There is no medium.)))
For those of us who work in Manhattan media, it means that a life of occasional excess and prerogative has been replaced by a drum beat of goodbye speeches with sheet cakes and cheap sparkling wine. It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that. (((In other words, Google did the revolutionary work of ADBUSTERS, and we now exist in a post-advertising, post-consumer society. How will people indulge in conspicuous consumption when the means of valorizing products as status objects no longer exists? Does anybody nowadays ever buy a car because a magazine ad says that it's cool? Would you buy a car if a TV ad made it look sexy? That was a great idea when everybody agreed, through mainstream media, that this behavior made you look sensible and respectable. But without this kind of manufactured social consensus – through a huge colossus of advertising and mainstream media – one has to wonder if consumer culture can possibly survive. If SUVS are toxic assets and suburban homes are toxic assets, what's left that ISN'T a toxic asset? None of those things were "toxic" as long as we were energetically persuaded that they were worth something, and that was the role of New York mainstream publishing and promotion. Even if we decide to live that way again, there's nobody left to do it for us and and no paying infrastructure that can support it.)))
Certain stalwart brands will survive and even thrive because of a new scarcity of quality content for niche audiences that demand more than generic information. (((Says who? Go have a look at media in the former Soviet Union and tell me where the "quality content niches" are.))) The chip that was implanted in me when I arrived at this newspaper — you might call it New York Times Exceptionalism — leads me to conclude that this organization will be one of those, but the insurgency continues apace. (((Is it an "insurgency" or an abject collapse into Putin-style "managed democracy"? Go find me some "content niches" for serious, accurate public discussion of public issues in the modern Republican Party. That's half the American population. Do they have even one such entity? Does anybody?)))
Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened. And then it did. (((Great realization, pal. Now you can figure out that scientists have been warning you about the sky itself for the past 40 years, and the best you clowns can do is shill for oil wars.))) Great big chunks of the sky gave way and magazines tumbled — Gourmet!? — that seemed as if they were as solid as the skyline itself. But to those of us who were here back in September of 2001, we learned that even the edifice of Manhattan itself is subject to perforation and endless loss....
