My weekly copy of the US News & World Report came today with this cover: "We are writing to inform you that this will be your last issue of (our) magazine...We will continue to publish the usnews.com website". The editor noted that this 77 year old publication started as a broadsheet newspaper and will continue its "information business" as pixels on the screen. I doubt it will last for long. As a long term subscriber, I had stopped reading it seriously years ago, not because of its format but because it didn't provide me with any unique information. Its "Best...Lists(best colleges, best hospitals etc) were entertaining, but nothing you could act on. Just like many city newspapers discovered when Craig's List took away their Classifieds income, not enough people were willing to pay for their low information content to be economically viable.
In today's WSJ, L. Gordon Crovitz comments on the Beatle's tunes coming to iTunes (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704496104575627282994471928.html?KEYWORDS=crovitz). He gives a short history of technology disruptions of the music industry: sheet music, phonographs, 8 track, cassettes, CD's, MP3. He notes that iTunes provided a model for payment after the analog to digital revolution made theft of music ubiquitous. He offers these key insights:
"For music and many content-based industries, the shift to the Information Age from the Industrial Age is a shift to digital versions from older analog versions. The older forms don't disappear altogether. Instead, traditional products find a more limited role alongside newer versions that take advantage of new technology to deliver different experiences to consumers. Sellers may lose scarcity value for their goods as digital tools make copying easy, but as iTunes has shown, convenience is also a service worth buying".
In the same issue of the WSJ, Vacellarp and Schechner write about the coming disruption by Online TV: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704264804575626902698357466.html?KEYWORDS=vascellaro
I don't know how this fight will turn out, but I'm betting on the disrupters. The only objection of the TV stations, afterall, is that they aren't getting paid for their content. Will the cable companies survive? The analog-to-digital disruption has only just begun. I don't expect my specialty, pathology, to survive in its present form. Why would you pay me $150K /yr to read slides on a microscope, when the slide images can be digitalized and read on a TV screen in India for $40 K/yr? Radiology will suffer the same fate. Every industry will feel its effects in some way.
James once asked me what I subscribed to, and I told him the WSJ, Discover Magazine (science) and The Atlantic (thinkers). Only the WSJ is very good. Discover is OK, but it's more of a "geewhiz" content provider than a "this may be important" information provider. The Atlantic was excellent under Michael Kelly, but now has liberal editors and is sinking under their politicized view of everything. In the end, "information" providers will be paid for aggregated data to specialist groups and information to general readers. The conversion of data to information will only be as good as the editors and writers strengths in critical thinking and communication skills. Right now, the WSJ is the most highly subscribed newspaper in the US, and is very expensive at $365/yr in the print edition. It is worth every penny.
People will always pay for information. The analog-to-digital disruption is an essential theme to follow. One of the Internet's famous quotes, by Stewart Brand, is:
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
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