Yeah, the Kool-Aid does taste funny. Molly Ivins tears into the assumption that the newspaper business is dying because it isn’t delivering profits. Sure, there’s a steady decline in the industry over the long term. But profits are still happening. What’s killing newspapers is a mania for profits at any cost. Cut reporters and the space devoted to news. Profits will certainly go up. But then newspapers will certainly die. Which wouldn’t matter if newspapers weren’t fundamental to the creation of a well-informed citizenry.

Yeah, but – isn’t the growth of the blogosphere making up for this? And acting as an offshore balance to the power of the mainstream media? Please, don’t pass the Kool-Aid. Ivins is dismissive of bloggers – they don’t have the size, interest and skills needed to go out and gather news; they remain “opinion-mongers”:

No one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter — nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

- Molly Ivins, Alternet

Give some of them time, Molly. Otherwise, good stuff. Particularly if you think that Rupert Murdoch assigning you a friend when you sign up for MySpace is mildly creepy, indicative of what lies ahead.

“All that is newspaper melts…” – Scott Rosenberg on the end of print newspapers:

… the same process that ate their classified income is going to affect [newspaper owners'] other revenue streams. Just as classifieds went from costly to free, the display advertising will begin to dry up, as youth-seeking national advertisers follow their targets to the online world. And the very core of the newspaper product, the professional news report, is under siege, thanks to a myriad of missteps in the newsrooms and the rise of amateur (in the best sense), free alternatives.

… the only kinds of reporting and writing that will survive are those that individual entrepreneurs can find sponsors for, or those done by people who are financially independent or who work for nothing in their spare time.

- Scott Rosenberg

It’s the beginning of the end of the big media monopoly, argues Robert X Cringely. The big media corporations may have succeeded in making copying illegal. But even Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that there’s been a total failure in stopping the growth of a culture of copying.

Big media’s next step will be to employ hacking techniques against peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Then, as consumer PR hits rock bottom, the corporates will introduce their own pretty peer-to-peer systems.

With corporate peer-to-peer – two incompatible ideas – likely to fail, big media will increasingly concentrate on media projects, like blockbuster films, requiring large amounts of cash. Text and music will come from individual writers and artists operating outside the old media loop.

If the corporates don’t accommodate this new media, they may find their game is over.
- Cringely’s Pulpit