The Hallmark Flaw of the Mass Media

March 10, 2026March 10, 2026 Vin

Ask historians to say when the Industrial Era began and they will cite dates in the 18^th or 19^th centuries when a factory powered by hydraulics or steam engine was first constructed in their nation. I think they’re wrong. The start of the Industrial Era shouldn’t be defined by what powered mechanisms of mass production, but by the invention of such a mechanism itself. In approximately 1454, the entrepreneurial metallurgist Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press: the world’s first mass production device.

Prior to Gutenberg, books were rarities, affordable only by the church or the rich. A typical scribe or monk in a scriptorium could copy by hand two to four pages daily, laboriously producing a simple book in three to six months. If the book was also ‘illuminated’ with illustrations or decorations, it could take up to three years. Gutenberg’s press used metal type characters that were set in a mirror-image analog of the page to be printed. This was then inked and pressed onto paper. A two-man team operating the press lever or crank could imprint hundreds of pages daily, enough to produce hundreds of books per month, more than a lifetime’s production by a scribe or monk.

The societal effects of Gutenberg’s press are often cited as ending the Middle Ages and beginning the Modern Era. This first mass production device fundamentally improved how human beings distribute, store, and trust information.

Nearly half a millennium later, Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of wireless broadcasting markedly extended the immediacy and reach of information. He converted electrical teletype signals into analog electromagnetic waves of radiation that could be instantly received across huge distances. The later additions of microphones and photovoltaic sensors and cathode receiver tubes resulted in radio and television.

From these analog production and distribution technologies of the Industrial Era arose the theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices that are now colloquially known as the Mass Media. Their industries globally generate US$3 trillion in gross revenues annually.

The Present

Since the mid-1990s, the Mass Media industries have created online versions of their Industrial Era products and services ‘converged’ into multimedia websites or ‘streaming’ services. The industries hoped that consumers and advertisers would utilize the websites the same way (i.e., as often and thoroughly) as consumers had printed products or broadcast services during the 20^th Century. The industries hoped that the same Industrial Era business models would work, too. Moreover, these industries hoped that eliminating the costs of purchasing, printing, and delivering paper products and eliminating the regulatory licensing hassles and transmission antenna or cable and satellite delivery systems carriage costs incurred with traditional broadcasts would result in far greater net revenues than the industries had ever generated.

Their hopes failed. Instead, virtually every sector of the Mass Media industries has seen its daily consumer audiences and advertising clientele, and thus gross revenues, decline when adjusted for economic inflation or population growth. In some Mass Media sectors, the failures are titanic. For instance, the U.S. newspaper daily industry, with remarkably rare exceptions during the past 30 years, has lost some 70 percent of its gross revenues, readership, and advertising clientele.

The disastrous results occurred because the Mass Media industries, in their attempts to adapt to the Informational Era’s personal computer-mediated technologies, overlooked or forgot the hallmark flaw of the Industrial Era’s analog technologies from which those industries arose. In the postgraduate media management courses that I taught for 14 years and my papers published in scholarly journals, I termed this hallmark flaw ‘analog uniformity’. Each pressrun prints identical copies. Every simultaneous listener or viewer of a broadcast hears or sees an identical program on that frequency or channel. With the analog technologies of the Industrial Era, there is no practical way to mass produce printed editions or broadcast programs which contain bespoke (i.e., fully customized) contents to each recipient consumer’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes.

This flaw wasn’t grave during the first 500 years of the Mass Media, when the overall supply of news, entertainment, and other information was scarce and printed periodical page space limited. Publishers initially chose the most universal of topics. Gutenberg famously printed Bibles in Christian Europe. As newspapers and later magazines emerged from presses, royal edicts and national news, and reports about wars and disasters, soon became the most popular secular topics printed. Writers started journals which became journalism. As the supplies of news, entertainment, and other information available for publications grew, editors began selecting stories according to two concomitant criteria: (1) stories about which there is the greatest common interest, and (2) important stories about which the editors think their community must be informed. Broadcasters adopted these same criteria when conceiving and producing their programs. Even as recently as 20 years ago, before most offices and homes in developed nations gained broadband Internet access or ‘smartphones’ were invented, this hallmark flaw of the Mass Media wasn’t calamitous.

Indeed, once circa 2006 the majority of offices and homes in developed nations had gained broadband access, and particularly three years later consumers began purchasing mobile phones that could retrieve and display multimedia contents, the Mass Media industries presumed the new media environment finally had become ripe for reaping their own online successes. Tragically, the industries either forgot or overlooked two fundamental facts:

First, they had inadvertently transplanted the hallmark flaw of Industrial Era analog media technologies into their Informational Era products and services, a huge flaw that these new media technologies inherently didn’t have. Second, the exponentially accelerating advancements of Moore’s Law and its corollaries were quickly turning the global media environment upside-down. Traditional scarcity of information flipped to surplus, ensuing inversions in not only the economics of information but also the power dynamics of transactions among content creators, intermediaries, and consumers.

The Mass Media industries had been forewarned about the epochal transformation that would forever alter how people obtain news, entertainment, and other information, and obsolesce many of the industries, theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices known as the Mass Media. In his seminal 1995 book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, wrote:

There is another way to look at a newspaper, and that is as an interface to news.

Imagine a future in which your interface agent can read every newswire and newspaper and catch every TV and radio broadcast on the planet and then construct a personalized summary. This kind of newspaper is printed in an edition of one.

What if a newspaper company were willing to put its entire staff at your beck and call for one edition? It would mix headlines news with ‘less important’ stories relating to acquaintances, people you will see tomorrow, and places you are about to go to or have just comes from. It would report on companies you know. In fact, under these conditions, you might be willing to pay the Boston Globe a lot more for ten pages than for a hundred pages, if you could be confident that it was delivering you the right subset of information. You would consume every bit (so to speak). Call it The Daily Me.

Two years later, Roger Fidler, former Director of New Media Development for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, wrote in his book, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media:

The vision that CMC [Computer-Mediated Communications] technologies employing advanced personal ‘agents’ will ultimately empower individuals to bypass, and perhaps replace, traditional information and entertainment gatekeepers has strong appeal within some groups.…A more all-encompassing Daily Me presents a much more difficult problem on CMC systems. But with more powerful microprocessors and a significant increase in telecommunications bandwidth, some version of the Daily Me is bound to emerge before the year 2010.

In What Newspapers And Their Web Sites Must Do To Survive, published in 2004 by the University of Southern California’s Online Journalist Review, I wrote:

For its survival, the newspaper industry must produce and automatically deliver, wired and wirelessly, entirely intact and individually customized editions that are smaller, vertically formatted, and that combine the graphical layout capabilities of print and the interactive multimedia capabilities of the Web, and flow to fit any display screen or printed paper size.

Appearing in 2006 on The New York Times’ Best Seller List, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, a book by Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired Magazine, focused entirely on computer-mediated technologies’ capabilities to provide to each individual a selection of items that better matches that individual’s unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, rather than the mainly items of greatest common interest. In that year, Amazon, Inc., a company already using that new business model, had grown to a market capitalization of $16 billion and today is a $2.2 trillion company.

Many Mass Media traditionalists abhor the concept of using computer-mediate technologies to aggregate and provide a bespoke feeds of news, entertainment, and other information to each consumer. For instance, in a 2009 column entitled the Daily Me, Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times warned that social science studies indicate human beings don’t naturally seek “good information” but rather information that corroborates their existing prejudices. He predicted that the ‘Daily Me’ concept would cause people to insulate in “hermetically sealed political chambers” or the “reassuring wombs of an echo chamber.”

I think that such mass hermeticization had already occurred by 2009 in the U.S. after the Mass Media industries’ 1996 launches of Fox News and MSNBC television networks. Moreover, as much as Kristoff mentions a human tendency to seek corroboration, I point to an even more predominant human behavior: the tendency to seek and obtain the best possible mix of items that match your own individual needs, interests, and tastes. It is the tendency that makes each of us individual (‘individuated’) and has been rather thoroughly confirmed by Freud, Jung, Habermas, et. al.

Many hidebound Mass Media executives also misperceive consumers’ growing demand for more individuated media as the ‘fragmenting’ or ‘atomizing’ of audiences, which from an Industrial Era perspective might seem true. However, Anderson in The Long Tail quotes me:

The individuals haven’t changed; they’ve always been fragmented. What’s changing is their media habits. They’re now simply satisfying the fragmented interests that they’ve always had.

I’ll write in subsequent editions of this newsletter about how the Mass Media industries myopic misperception that they could transplant their traditional products and services, business models, doctrines, and theories into computer-mediated technologies was an industrial-scale example of the Einstellung Effect, the tendency to use traditional thinking to solve a novel problem even though better or more appropriate and analytical methods of solving the problem exist. For now, however, let’s advance to the third act of this tragedy.

The Future

As the capabilities of computer-mediated technologies ever more articulately aggregate, select, and deliver individuated feeds of news, entertainment, and other information to each of the world’s consumers ineluctably continued to advance exponentially, sooner or later a company or companies would commercialize it. What was remarkable in the new media environment, however, was that the companies that did weren’t initially founded to do so, but then phenomenally succeeded.

For example, Google was founded as a company selling webpage ranking software, not as a media company providing news, entertainment, and other types of information, nor selling advertising space or time. Facebook, which was originally founded as a ‘hot or not’-type friend or date finding application first at Harvard University. Twitter (now known as X) was founded as a group messaging application rather than any source of news, entertainment, or other information. The stories are similar for many search engines and social media applications that started in other nations. These startup companies, however, understood computer-mediated technologies’ capabilities to create individuated services and contents feeds. And they also understood the novel business doctrine nowadays called ‘User-Driven Innovation’ in which if most of their customers begin using their product or service for other than the purposes for which those were initially intended, pivot and focus that product or service on that new purpose rather than fight it.

During the past 25 years ago, literally billions of consumers started discovering that by ‘search engine’ and ‘social media’ services to connect to their friends, denote their ‘Likes’, and let these services’ algorithms record what they watch or search, they then could start receiving increasingly articulate feeds of news, entertainment, other information, discussions, and friendships. These individuated feeds are a better match to their individual needs, interests, and tastes than the products or services from any Mass Media company or alliance of such companies can provide. Additionally, even newer startup companies have launched services that use computer-mediated technologies solely to provide individuated streams of music to consumers (Pandora, Spotify, etc.).

Because search engines, social media, and other individuated streaming services all have mass production and mass reach capabilities equal or greater to the Mass Media yet with the unprecedented simultaneous capability of mass individuation, are entirely based and reliant upon computer-mediated technologies, have no possible analog media equivalents, and overcome or obsolescence numbers of the Mass Media’s theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices, I radically posit these to be an entirely new genus of media, rather than ancillary some spinoffs or ancillaries of the Mass Media. In my classroom and scholarly publications, I’ve termed them the Individuated Media.

Once the Mass Media industries noticed the growing popularity of Individuated Media, those traditional industries create their own accounts on these new services so that their websites might receive online traffic from these. That soon became the Mass Media industries’ main sources of online traffic, yet primarily because billions of consumers were abandoning their habitual usage of the Mass Media industries and switching to the Individuated Media industries’ services. Google and Facebook have become two of the fastest growing companies in world history and between them now control slightly more than half of the world’s ‘digital’ advertising sales, including local advertising. Earlier this year, the Reuters Institute at Oxford University reported that the social media sector of the Individuated Media industries has now become the predominant means by which people of the world first obtain news, entertainment, and other information, eclipsing television for those purposes.

The phenomenal popular and financial successes of Individuated Media industries at the expense of the Mass Media industries has motivated some the latter to lobby their national governments to force Individuated Media companies to pay some financial compensation for their losses. That is now law in Australia and Canada, yet the compensations aren’t nearly the magnitude of the losses.

Worse for the Mass Media industries, the exponentially advancing capabilities of computer-mediated technologies have now reached the capabilities of Artificial Narrow Intelligence, otherwise known as Generative or Agentic ‘AI’. The search engine sectors of the Individuated Media industries are no longer mainly providing to consumers links to Mass Media industries’ websites and instead themselves using AI to answer consumers’ search questions. This means that the Mass Media industries have immediately seen their websites’ traffic drop by 40 or more percent, with commensurate declines in those websites’ advertising sales revenues.

Such usage of AI by the Individuated Media industries will only increase as the exponentially advancing capabilities of computer-mediated technologies do. Atop the past 20 years’ huge declines in the Mass Media industries’ audiences, advertisers, and revenues, these developments portent those increasingly antiquated industries probable doom.

Although the Mass Media industries have begun studying how to use AI, because those industries are still largely clueless that the huge consumer demand for individuated services is why competition from Individuated Media services are the root causes of their audience, advertisers, and revenues losses, they are myopically focusing their experiments with AI on newsroom usage, rather than in using AI’s peerless ever-increasing capabilities to individuate news, entertainment, and other informational services, which is exactly how Individuated Media uses AI.

The exponential progress of Moore’s Law, the concurrent rise in Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities, and even the possible introduction of practical Quantum computing, will likely ensure ever increasing individuation of media services during the 21^st Century.

Bezos & Bogeymen

March 4, 2026March 4, 2026 Vin

Don’t Get Distracted from the Existential Problem

In 1998 when I first began questioning if the Mass Media industries would have a future, the senior vice president of marketing at largest daily newspaper in Texas tried to reassure me, “People have been using newspapers for centuries, so we expect they will for centuries more.”

What immediately crossed my mind was that horses had been a prime means of transportation for millennia, so people living 100 years ago probably thought this meant that horses would still be a prime means of transportation in future centuries, too. How wrong they were! Within 30 years of 1898, horses had disappeared as a prime means of transportation in most developed nations. Not just in Texas!

Last week in this newsletter’s first edition, I stated that its focus is the existential threat now confronting the Mass Media industries as the Industrial Era wanes and the Informational Era dawns. What is this threat? Is it truly existential? Or am I being over-dramatic or otherwise hyperbolic? No, I can justify what I here state.

Twenty years ago, the Mass Media industries was riding high. Many of those industries announced recorded earnings during the first half-decade of the new millennium. Although the ‘Great Recession’ then struck, those industries reasonably expected to restore and resume those record earnings soon afterward. However, that didn’t happen.

Since 2007, almost all sectors of the Mass Media industries have seen plummeting audiences (i.e,. readership, listenership, or viewership); advertising clienteles; and gross revenues (turnover) when such numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation. Some of the declines have been spectacular, an example of which I’ll describe below and in subsequent newsletters. Starting next week, I’ll likewise write about he categorical reasons for these declines.

However, in this second edition of the Digital Deliverance newsletters, let’s focus on the proximate reason why the Mass Media industries are not only in rapid decline but actually in danger of extinction, a tangible problem already creating troubling societal effects.

What is this existential threat? Some myopic pundits call it the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem.

During the past 30 years, literally billions of consumers worldwide have begun using personal computer-mediated technologies, rather than printed products or broadcast services, as their primary means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information. Yet during that time, the Mass Media industries unfortunately haven’t been unable to devise a business model or models with these new technologies that enable them to earn revenues equal or greater than those they’d earned from the printed products or broadcast services which those billions of consumers are abandoning.

Simply naming this the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem is a misnomer that crudely allows too many ‘content creators’ to disclaim responsibility and claim that it is a problem for their business office to solve. In fact, it’s as much a Missing Product Model’ or ‘Missing Service Model’ problem. The printed products and broadcast services of the Mass Media industries had been phenomenally popular during the previous century but no longer are, no matter if now in print, broadcast, or online. So, it is more accurately a ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ and has also begun causing societal problems.

The example I’ll use in explaining this is the U.S. newspaper industry. The newspaper sector of the Mass Media was the first to encounter personal computer-mediated technologies (as teletext or proprietary online services), thus it has had the most experiments and longest experiences with these new technologies. The United States of America is the world’s largest newspaper market.

If you ask journalists or news executives what the single greatest threat to journalism nowadays is, most will likely say either censorship or else the murders or imprisonments of journalists. They are wrong. Although censorship is rampant worldwide, it doesn’t exist in all nations of the world. As for murders or imprisonments, most journalism rights organizations report that 130 were killed and between 300 and 600 imprisoned last year. Yet as atrocious as those murders and imprisonments were and as restraining as censorship might be, the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ is manifestly causing even greater losses of journalism.

As proof, consider some arithmetic about journalism. According to the the Pew Research Center, more than more than 100,000 journalists in the U.S. became unemployed since 2008, primarily because the news enterprises for which they worked are shrinking due to falling revenues caused by the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ problem. If each of those 100,000 U.S. journalists had been reporting an average of between one and five stories per week, that probably means between 100,000 and half a million local, regional, national, or international news stories per week are no longer being reported. This means between 5 million to 25 million unreported stories during a typical American 50-week work year.

That’s just in U.S. Although I’ve not been able to locate an estimate for the global number of journalists who have become unemployed due to this problem, my educated guess is between 500,000 and 2 million. So, the number of news stories that aren’t reported due to the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ problem are magnitudes more than those unreported by the 130 journalists killed and 300 to 600 who were imprisoned.

That arithmetic also holds true for the Mass Media industries’ sectors creating and packaging contents that aren’t hard news, such as topical magazines and radio and video feature, etc. All topical media also are subjects of this problem.

So, you might think after 20 years of such declines that journalists are zealously trying to solve the ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’? Think again! A relatively small minority who’ve become unemployed have tried to start their own journalistic enterprises, reporting stories from their communities and posting those on websites they have created. Their successes among are few and far between. Some have been able to keep themselves fed and housed. Very few cases have been able to sustain employment for teams of journalists. (The Texas Tribune is often cited as a regional example, as are Semafor and Mediahuis as national or international examples.) None has found a model that is readily usable in all communities, such as the printed newspaper was during the 20^th Century.

Most journalists, plus perhaps most people employed in the Mass Media industries, just want to continue what they have been doing. Many simply seem to assume that the theories, doctrines, business models, practices, and products and services that arose during the Industrial Era and have become known as the Mass Media are the ne plus ultra – the evolutionary ultimate in media (particularly now that multimedia ‘convergence’ has been added to and delivery is ‘digital’). That’s an unrealistic daydream shattered by billions of consumers having abandoned regular usage of the Mass Media industries’ products and services in printed, broadcast, or online. Yet many journalists and other content creators in the Mass Media industries refuse to believe the ‘Missing Business Model’ problem is in reality a ‘Missing Business / Product / Services Model’ problem in which the products or services they produce are crucially failing components.

Which brings me back to the subject of bogeymen. For instance, Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post. I’ve read dozens of news or media industry publications and websites that bewail Bezos’s ‘layoffs’ of one-third of his newspaper’s newsroom staff. According to them, when Bezos purchased that newspaper 13 years ago for US$250 million he was supposed to underwrite its losses forever. (I can locate no records of him ever having said so).

The Washington Post last year lost $100 million. As it did so during 2024. And it lost $70 million during 2023, and perhaps equal or smaller millions in previous years. The trajectory of its declines is no different from those of virtually all 1,100+ daily newspapers still published in the U.S. So, add all that to the $250 million Bezos paid in 2013 to purchase that newspaper. The Washington Post’s weekday printed circulation is now less than 97,000 and during the past three years its website’s ‘digital’ subscriptions dropped from 3 million to 2.5 million. Bezos has put more than a half billion dollars into keeping that newspaper operating. When is enough enough?

I know of a journalism professor who has written that the solution for the U.S. newspaper industry’s declines is for billionaires or multimillionaires to purchase each U.S. newspaper and operate these as a sort of charitable hobby. That too is a nice daydream. However, keeping dying patients alive via life support systems at charity hospitals doesn’t cure them. Likewise, the newspapers that plan to convert their legal status from commercial enterprises to not-for-profit organizations are simply swallowing a placebo.

Had those who blame Bezos as a bogeyman thought that he was a technological wizard who would devise devise some way to stop and reverse the newspaper industries’ declines in audiences, advertising clienteles, and revenues? Ditto biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong who in 2010 purchased the Los Angeles Times. Those wizards obviously were unable to do so. When in the 10^th Century powerful King Canute went to the beach and commanded the tides to stop, did his courtiers and subjects condemn him when the tides continued? Bezos’s subsidization of The Washington Post likely kept that newspaper operating better and longer for the past 13 years that it otherwise might. (Ask the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a newspaper even older than the District of Columbia itself, what the alternative is.)

For more than 20 years, remarkable number of Mass Media journalists and pundits have been blaming either bogeymen or cursory factors for their industries declines: feckless tycoons, hedge funds, corporate chain ownerships, dividend pressure from Wall Street, etc. In 2005, Columbia Journalism Review Publisher Evan Cornog even penned an tongue-in-cheek essay entitled Let’s Blame the Readers (an essay which suspiciously has since been removed from CJR’s online archive but is still available elsewhere). Let’s eliminate these bogeymen or cursory factors as the problem.

Compare the declines in audiences, advertising clientele, and gross revenues of the Mass Media companies owned by hedge funds, corporate chains, and publicly-held corporations versus those of the Mass Media companies that are independently or private owned or not-for-profit. You’ll see the declines are statistically the same regardless of those enterprises’ legal status or ownerships.

Look wider: the declines of Mass Media industries in Canada, 22 of the 27 European Union nations, Australia, Japan, Israel, Singapore, Malaysia, the Republic of South Africa, and many other developed nations remarkably parallel the declines of such industries in the U.S.

Another common false excuse for the Mass Media industries inability to devise a viable business model online says that consumers online have became ‘used to’ or ‘habituated’ to not paying for news, entertainment, and other information back when websites were first developed. It says that if all websites back then had charged, there now would be no problem. Such claimants are ignorant. I’ve been working full-time at the Mass Media industries adaptation to online since 1993. I was personally involved in scores of attempts to get their consumers to pay for online content during the 1990s and subsequent decades. Lack of charging back then wasn’t the problem simply because there was no such lack.

Long overdue is the time for journalists and other creators of traditional Mass Media products and services to awake to the understanding that the reasons why billions of consumers worldwide have shifted their media consumption away from those traditional products or services (even those placed online) isn’t merely a business office problem. It is a massive problem arising from those products and services. It’s the obsolescence of those products and services. There is no business model that will ever again make these products and services viable. Journalists and other content producers need to stop blaming others, notably bogeymen, for that fundamental problem. Journalists and other content producers need to join with their business office staffs in solving the problem (don’t worry: neither journalistic objectivity nor creative control needs to be sullied or surrendered).

Starting in next week’s newsletter, I’ll explaining how to solve this fundamental and existential problem. I’ll do so by defining the solution and dimensions, which is how I’d taught it for the past 14 years to my total of 220 postgraduate students; presented it at forums such as the World Media Economics and Management conferences and the International Media Management Academics Association; and have published it in the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability. Until next week!

The Digital Deliverance Newsletter

February 24, 2026February 24, 2026 Vin

More than 20 years ago, the Mass Media industries myopically and thus catastrophically bet their future on the wrong path adapting to personal computer-mediated technologies.

They mistook prerequisites and superficialities, such as ‘convergence’, ‘digital first,’ and ‘do what you do best and link to the rest,’ as the major and ultimate metamorphoses that these technologies wrought in the media environment.

They expected the websites that they built would yield net profits equal or larger than their printed or broadcast services and products had earned, thereby sustaining themselves into the future.

Despite forewarnings, they shortsightedly failed to perceive and comprehend ever much greater (indeed, epochal) changes that were then already underway. Some of the Mass Media industries have blithely trod this rapidly obsolete path for more than a quarter century, despite it having so obviously led them into disaster and accelerating towards their eventual doom.

With exceedingly rare exceptions, these industries in developed nations have now lost more than half their consumer audiences (readerships, listenerships, or viewerships), more than two-thirds their advertising clientele, and more than half their gross revenues when the numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation in the economy. Less prideful or less hidebound industries would long ago have realized, nonetheless admitted, that their adaptation strategy to personal computer-mediated technologies is a deluded debacle and instantly alter strategy.

This disaster is an industrial-scale example of the Einstellung Effect — a cognitive bias in which industry executives who aren’t used to a radical change employ outmoded but familiar methods to solve unprecedented problems, doing so even when they’ve been forewarned that more appropriate and efficient new solutions exists. In the cases of the Mass Media industries, they formulated, implemented, and have continued an adaptation strategy that might have seemed to them relevant during the 1990s but which subsequently failed to keep abreast even greater changes that the ever accelerating developments in computer-mediated technologies have wrought since then.

The Digital Deliverance newsletter will explain:

What wrong path the Mass Media industries took;
Why that path was wrong;
What those industries should instead have done;
How those industries own journalists and academicians inadvertently hampered their industries’ successful adaptation
What opportunities the Mass Media industries might be able to salvage.

Consequently, it will also explain what are now being called Individuated Media and which in effect are a new and unprecedented genus of media that have already replaced the Mass Media as the predominant means by which most people in the world obtain news, entertainment, and other information, and why that is demonstrably so.

In English-language idiom, that’s known as ‘a tall order’. Why should I be writing it and you be reading it? Compare my credential against those of others who would purport to explain these things:

• My name is Vin Crosbie. I’ve worked for the past 32 years full-time advising the Mass Media industries how to adapt to personal computer-mediated technologies. (For the prior 15 years, I’ve was an executive with News Corp., Reuters, the original United Press International, the owner of a daily newspaper, and the fifth generation of my family in the media management business.) My consulting company Digital Deliverance, LLC, is 30 years old. I’ve consulted to clients on five continents.

• The decade-year-old International Journal of New Media Studies requested my permission to use my seminal 2002 essay What is New Media? as the very first thing it published.

• I’ve co-chaired and co-moderated the World Association of News Publishers’ Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna, as well as been a speaker at most of the developed world’s major media conferences.

• I’ve given the Republic of Singapore’s Annual Media Lecture in its National Library auditorium, with an introduction by Singapore’s President.

• I was the first person, only industry consultant, and only academician, quoted in the Congressional Research Service’s report The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition, to brief the U.S. Congress about that industry’s disastrous problems adapting to the future.

• My speech to the National Association of Broadcasters conference was one of 23 orations — including speeches by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton — selected by a team of speech professors for publication in the anthology Representative American Speeches.

• Although I lack university or college degrees, I was enlisted in 2007 by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, America’s premiere school of broadcasting, to write and teach New Media Business, a required course for master’s degree students in New Media and in Media Management. I continued as that course’s exclusive teacher until 2021 when I retired from scheduled teaching of graduate students and returned to consulting. I’ve also taught similar courses at Rhodes University in South Africa; and lectured at Peking and Tsinghua universities in China and at the University of Southern California, University of California at Berkeley, University of Missouri, and Virginia Commonwealth University in the U.S.A.

• At their invitation, I’ve presented academic papers at the biennial World Media Economics and Management Conferences and at the International Media Academics Association. Much of what I will explain in this newsletter has been published in the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, among other scholarly journals.

As is clear from my tone, I am direct and radically dissident from my consulting competitors or other media professors. I realistically expect that what I write will cause controversy and result in outrage or rejection by the very people who caused the Mass Media industries to trod for more than two decades along the wrong path into the 21^st Century. Those industries’ wake-up call is overdue. So, please subscribe to The Digital Deliverance newsletter via Substack. There is a free version for general readers who don’t need to implement specific solutions, plus a paid version (US$8 per month) for media executives and which details how to solve the serious difficulties and grave challenges they face. Read how.

The ‘Threat’ of Chinese Auto Manufacturers

January 6, 2026January 7, 2026 Vin

The last hútòng (胡同) I explored was in the year 2000, in the southern suburbs of Beijing. Many of its residents still wore drab green or grey uniform ‘Mao’ suits. A hútòng is a neighborhood of streets and narrow alleys separating blocks of one- or two-story traditional Chinese multi-family houses containing common courtyards. You’ll rarely find a hútòng in any populous city in China. During the past quarter century — yes, it’s been that long, most hútòngs have been razed and replaced by towering modern apartment blocks. Hundreds of thousands of hútòngs gone. During that time, China’s economy has advanced 600%; 850 million of China’s 1.4 billion people were lifted above the poverty line, and by 2030 (only four years) it is predicted by Western analysts that 27% of Chinese adults with have college educations — that same percentage as Germans.

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has grown 310% since 2000, the number Americans living under the poverty line has increase from 12.2% to 15.9%, and literacy has dropped to 79% to 80% — meaning that one out of every five Americans struggles to read, 21% are functionally illiterate, and half of the population reads at no better than a sixth-grade level (an 11 to 12-year old level). These declines have demonstratively shifted American politics.

In the nearly four decades 1988, only two Republicans have won the White House: George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Thoughtful, probative, and politically experienced Republican nominees as Robert Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost elections. Starting in 2008 to compensate, the Republican party largely stopped campaigning about policies that compete with those of Democrat candidates and began competing about what it calls ‘cultural’ ‘ issues: the Starbucks coffee chain no longer printing ‘Merry Christmas’ on its cups, Barack Obama wearing a brown suit, there being ‘transgendered’ athletes (perhaps hundreds of them within a nation of more than 300 million people!) competing in scholastic athletic games, about immigrants allegedly eating natives’ pets, wind turbines allegedly causing cancer, scientifically-proven human-caused climate change being a ‘hoax’, alleged Jewish ‘space lasers’ causing forest fires, about the 66% of Americans who are Christians allegedly being discriminated against by the majority of Americans, and other dingbat conspiracy theories and what I call ‘conservative twinkie’ issues that rile the gullible and illiterate among Americans into voting for whomever deceitfully utters such lies.

Hence, a minority of American voters (i.e., slightly under 50%), perhaps the 50% who read at a sixth-grade level, in 2024 knowingly and willfully voted a multiply-convicted felon and known (“rape,” the trial judge called it) sex offender into the Oval Office.

For nearly 80 In China, there is a dictatorship by one political party over that nation. No political opposition or dissent is allowed. Why have 1.4 billion Chinese citizens not overthrown that? Because 100 million Chinese Communist Party members permeate that nation, totally control the police and military, and for decades have struck an unwritten agreement with the rest of the populace: ‘allow our dictatorship and we will bring hundreds of millions of you out of poverty and make you effectively as rich as people in the world’s developed nations.’ Western experts now consider between 400 million and 700 million Chinese to be ‘middle class’.

When Chinese Communist statesman and political theorist Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1980, he radically reshaped Communist economic theory and policies. He knew China’s historical mercantile power and had studied the modern economic rises of Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. While keeping his political party’s dictatorship, he rejected classical (i.e., 19th Century) Marxist economic policy of a totally party-run economy and embraced economic capitalism in China. He specifically, created an economic system in which the Chinese people are free to own and run businesses, properties, and equities, yet the Chinese Communist Party still can modify the nation’s economic course if it sees fit. “it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat,” He remarked. It has been Deng’s economic policies that have caused China’s economy t become the world’s largest (if not yet richest) and lifted more than half of all Chinese out of poverty.

What do I mean by the Chinese Communist Party can modify that nation’s economic course if it sees fit? Deng and his fellow party members realized that China needed infrastructure yet that no startup or established Chinese company had the financial or technical wherewithal to build such infrastructure. So, the Chinese government gave ‘seed’ money to thousands of Chinese entrepreneur who wanted to start construction companies and industries. The government’s expectation was that most of these entrepreneurs, competing against one another, would fail, but that the remaining ones would prove competent and financially solid. The result was that 190,700 kilometers (118,500 miles) of superhighways have been built in China (compared to 78,680 kilometers or 48,890 miles of superhighway in the larger U.S.) China now has 50,400 kilometers (31,318 miles) of high-speed passenger rail, compared to a mere 137 kilometers (85 miles) in the U.S. Chinese college and universities also have been beneficiaries of these policies. In the U.S., 40 percent of working age Americans have college degrees compared to nearly 27% of Chinese, yet 49% of the world’s patents last year were filed by Chinese compared to 18% by Americans.

I’m not a communist and deplore the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. In fact, I’ve seen first-hand how the rights of Chinese citizens have regressed under President Xi Jinping’s dictatorship. For example, When during 2000 I lectured at Peking University (China’s version of Harvard), no political discussions were permitted, particularly in front of foreigners such as myself. Yet when I lectured at Tsinghua University (China’s version of Yale) during 2010, Chinese faculty professors opening argued with each other about politics and human rights. But since Xi took office, things are back to where they were during 2000. Nonetheless, it was very savvy of his predecessor Deng to have realized that the economics of classical were obsolete and to adopt market capitalism run by then Chinese Communist Party. That isn’t classical communist-run economics like the Soviet Union and its satellite countries used, in which the party micromanages everything and owns everything. The failures of the Soviet Union and its satellites amply demonstrates than classical Marxist economics doesn’t work. Instead, this is communist-run capitalism; a form of state-run, non-micromanaged capitalism which has made China a developed nation, made Communist Vietnam the fastest-growing economy in the world, and earlier made developed nations the western nations of Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. (note: although Japan was rebuilt by the U.S. after World War II, it has been solely self-governing since 1960 and has since become the world’s third largest economy during the six decades since.)

My acquaintances who are American conservatives abhor the idea of the state having anything to do with the economy. They advocate the classical 18th-Century laissez-faire capitalism of Adam Smith in which governments have no roles in economies. I, however, believe that the incredible economic growth and success of China, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan (as well as perhaps Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Norway) illuminate the obsolescence of that 18th-Century economics. The state can and should take a strategic role over the tactics of the market. That role includes not just ‘keeping an even playing field’ but using governmental sovereign wealth to seed or incentivize the direction of the market. (Some of my American conservative acquaintances are nowadays actually advocating governmental strategic support for the U.S. semiconductor industry and possibly the industries behind Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing!)

Which brings me back to subject of Chinese automobiles. It was almost non-existent prior to Deng taking power, yet since 2009 it has been world’s largest and most competitive automobile industry. Although Detroit produces automobiles with more cup-holders, China produced technologically superior and more luxurious automobile for less cost than anywhere on the planet. Indeed, nearly half a decade ago the Chinese government foresaw electric vehicle as the world’s primary type of automobiles in the future, and poured money into startup or established Chinese automobile manufacturers who could efficiently and lucratively produce such vehicles. Last year, the Chinese manufacturer BYD surpassed the U.S. firm Tesla as the world’s largest manufacturer of electric vehicles.

My first experience with a Chinese automobile was about five years ago in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. I rode in a BYD sports utility vehicle of technological sophistication and luxury beyond what I was used to in Europe or North America. Some American kneejerk conservatives might be tempted to claim that such vehicle might not be safe. However, Volvo is now a Chinese automobile company; the Chinese auto industry manufacturers its vehicle to European safety standards; and, as a few million Australians might now tell you, Chinese vehicles don’t lack for safety.

I think (no, I know) that Chinese automobiles are far superior to U.S. for their price. Should Chinese automobile brand dealerships appear in the U.S., as they have appeared in Australia and some European nations, their competition would put most Ford, General Motors, and Stellaris (the former Chrysler) dealerships out of business. For such reasons, President Biden banned Chinese brands from the U.S. automobile market, a ban Donald Trump has continued. Traditional capitalism dictates that consumers should be given their choice of products. Yet the Republican party threw out traditional capitalism when it nominated Trump. However, what motivation do U.S. automobile manufacturers have to improve their products? Is it only the competition among themselves? Or should they compete against other nations’ automobiles, as they already do those from Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and the U.K.? When does a ban become destructive to its own supposed beneficiaries?

You be the judge. Consider Marquis Brownlee‘s (20.7 million YouTube subscribers) review of the Xiaomi’s SU7, which is just one of the new models of automobiles manufactured in China.

What do you think of it and this international trade issue?

For My Fellow Connecticut Yankees

December 30, 2025December 30, 2025 Vin

I’ve never regretted being born and living most of my life in bucolic Connecticut.

Late 2025

December 1, 2025December 1, 2025 Vin

thanksgiving-holiday-2025 — Thanksgiving Holiday, 2025. West Newbury, Massachusetts

Shooting Immersive Videos

November 23, 2025November 23, 2025 Vin

Join my wife and I in a video experiment: I’ve lately begun creating ‘immersive videos.’ For example, this one from aboard a tourist cruise on the Bosporus.

After being trained in still photography 50 years ago (i.e., 1973-1976 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, back then sometimes known as ‘Kodak’s Photo School’, I mostly switched to videography two years ago. Moreover, I’ve now begun experimenting with immersive videos, what some people call ‘360 video’ but (to describe it more accurately) shoot video 360-degrees in all directions. For example, if you’re viewing this 31-minute video, you’ll probably be able to experience what I mean by immersive. This technology was initially created for viewing in Virtual Reality googles. However, it can also be used with goggle the way this video demonstrates:

If you’re viewing this blog post on a television’s YouTube app, sorry, but the effect won’t work (even if you were crazy enough to move the television in a circle).
If you’re viewing this blog post via a smartphone or tablet, click on the video to start it (if it hasn’t already), then move your device in a circle, semi-circle, or some other wide motion. The video’s viewpoint will change with your movement so that you can see in any direction you want.
If you’re viewing this blog post via a laptop or desktop computer, click on the video to start (if it hasn’t already) then use your mouse or trackpad to change the video’s viewpoint.

My wife and I had some spare time during October while in Istanbul, so we boarded a tourist cruise boat on the Bosporus shortly before sunset (scroll the video ahead until its last quarter.)

My first experience with this cutting-edge of video actually began nine years ago when while teaching postgraduate New Media Business I purchase a Samsung Gear 360 camera. Resembling a white tennis ball atop a tiny tripod, the Gear 360 camera could capture immersive still photos and immersive video. Unfortunately, its videos and still photos were only in HD resolution (1920×1080 pixels) and viewable only via Samsung’s special software. By contrast, this 4K-resolution (3840 x 2160) video was shot with a pole-mounted DJI Osmo 360 camera which is the size and shape of a cigarette pack. (If the quality of this video isn’t 4K when you view it, click the YouTube ‘gear’ icon and switch to a higher resolution version.)

What I like about shooting immersive video is that had I missed something interesting that occurred behind, atop, or under me after I finished shooting the video, I can later edit the video as if I had intended to capture that occurrence. I also like immersive videos because these allow the viewer the ability to anything and everything that occurs around the camera.

While in Istanbul, I also shot immersive videos while walking through that city’s famous bazaars. I also shot some inside mosques in Istanbul and later Cairo. I post some of those here in the coming weeks.

Click Singing in Xhosa

September 10, 2025November 22, 2025 Vin

Yesterday, I posted the Ndlovu Youth Choir of the Republic of South Africa singing Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody in the Isizulu language, and I noted that language’s click consonants which are common to Bantu languages but virtually unknown in Indo-European or East Asia languages. Enjoy this six-minute video of South African singer Siki Jo-Ann singing in Xhosa language of South Africa, the second most popular native language in that nation, a wonderful language in which clicking is most prominent. It starts with a two-minute humorous skit between a white South African and a black South African joking about those clicks. Siki Jo-Ann enters at the two and one-half minute mark, singing the clicks of Xhosa.

Zulu Queen

September 9, 2025September 9, 2025 Vin

And why not Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody sung in Isizulu by the Ndlovu Youth Choir of the Republic of South Africa?

isiZulu (note the lower-case initial i) is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken in, and indigenous to, Southern Africa. It’s one of the Republic of South Africa’s official language, spoken by a quarter of that nation’s population, and was the native language of Nelson Mandela. I first heard it during 2009 while working at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. You’ll hear in it some of the click consonants common to Bantu languages, a common sound unheard of in Indo-European or the languages of East Asia. (Tomorrow, I think that I’ll post a video clip of Siki Jo-Ann who sings in the Xhosa language of South Africa, the second most popular native language in the nation, a wonderful language in which clicking is most prominent.)

Stop Acting Like This is Normal

September 7, 2025September 7, 2025 Vin

Four weeks after one-time convicted felon Adolph Hitler was inaugurated as German Chancellor and 92 years before the 34-times convicted felon Donald Trump‘s second inauguration as President of the United States, and four weeks after Adolph Hitler was inaugurated as German Chancellor, Dutch pyromaniac Marinus van der Lubbe, set afire the German Reichstag parliament building. Arriving at the scene in Berlin, Hitler called the fire a “sign from God” and during the following day triggered the German ‘Enabling Act‘, emergency legislation that suspended not only the homeless German legislature but also suspended freedoms of speech, assembly, and other civil rights throughout Germany. He alone became the absolute dictator of that nation. German freedoms and civil rights wouldn’t begin to be restored until a dozen years later when conquering Allied troops seized Berlin from the Nazis.

Hitler, a felon who in 1923 fomented a violent, failed uprising for which he served prison time, had better initial luck than Trump, now a convicted American felon who four years ago fomented a violent, failed uprising for which he is unpunished and on the loose, seized the Reichstag fire as excuse to gain a dictatorship. So, Trump has concocted an ’emergency,’ claiming that a Venezuelan-based drug cartel has ‘invaded’ the U.S. He fraudulently (he is, after all, a convicted fraud) claims that this permits him to trigger the little-known Enemy Aliens Act of 1798, which permits a U.S. president to deport, without trial or judicial hearing, foreigners who he believes are a threat to the nation. The Enemy Aliens Act was controversial 227 years ago, nonetheless today. Although federal courts have now blocked Trump’s implementation of the Enemy Aliens Act, he nevertheless has used it as a lynchpin to seize more dictatorial control of the nation than any president during the past 80 years or more.

In this 19-minute video podcast, American political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein compares American citizen’s slow reactions to Trump increasingly dictatorial seizure of power as akin to the metaphor of frogs who don’t yet realize that they are being fatally boiled because of how gradually the heat is being applied; how so accustomed they have become to the gradually increasing danger until the realization of dangers comes too late. He issues an alarm, an alarm call to America to stop acting as if MAGA politics is normal.

Welcome to the 21st Century: the Bulletproof Volvo

July 6, 2025July 6, 2025 Vin

Stuck in traffic? Worried about those other drivers or pedestrians? For decades, Volvos has been renowned for automotive safety in case of collisions. Yet why not purchase a Volvo armored against terrorists, MAGA cultists (i.e., we know they don’t purchase Volvos), and psychopathic citizens? Yes, to fit your modern lifestyle, you too can purchase a large family SUVs XC60 and XC90 with bulletproof protective armoring. These vehicles, now available from any Volvo dealers, are ballistically certified to NIJ IIIA standards in combination with VPAM 2009, the extensive 360° armoring can help protect all occupants in the event of a security threat. Available in both electric and hybrid gasoline/electric versions, these cars are available both to private and corporate customers.

America Ranks Behind 20 Other Nations in its Citizens’ Inability to Pay for a Healthy Diet

July 6, 2025July 8, 2025 Vin

So, why has the United States government, led by a convicted multiple felon, reduced the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the country’s largest nutrition assistance program? More than 42 million Americans use the SNAP program, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. According to that department , more than 62% of SNAP participants are in families with children, and more than 38% are in working families. The State of New Mexico has the largest share participating in SNAP, with some 21% of the population helped by the program. The program provides crucial support for families with low-paying jobs, low-income older adults, people with disabilities and others.

The answer is Republican politicians’ evil disregard for struggling citizens. Lack of healthy nutrition for those citizens is an actual problem. Yet that problem isn’t as important as are continuing cuts to the wealthiest citizens’ taxes. It more important to Republican politicians that the small minority (i.e., fewer than 5 percent of the population) of citizens, who can easily afford adequate nutrition, pay ever smaller taxes, then are the actual struggles of a larger number of citizens in need of adequate nutrition. After all, didn’t doomed Queen Marie Antoinette say to her to struggling French families with low-paying jobs and low-income French senior citizens who couldn’t afford bread, “Let them eat cake!” Today’s MAGA Republican party would be proud of her!

Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

For his business blog, visit http://www.digitaldeliverance.com