Digital Deliverance Newsletter #4: Clear Evidence Existed 20 Years Ago Websites Won’t Compensate for Print Edition Losses When is a strategy recognized as disastrous? How long must its obvious devastation be experienced until it is called what it so clearly is? How much sheer volume of perennially negative data does it take to alert reasonably intelligent executives to the factual reality that they’ve executed a strategy which has become catastrophic? Indeed, if a strategy has already failed for over a quarter century, how much longer until the executives who maintain it escape what otherwise appears to be a zombie-like condition in which they thoughtlessly stagger towards their doom? In the cases of Mass Media executives, perhaps never. They executed a disastrous strategy for adapting to the changes wrought by the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment. They’ve hoped this strategy would at least reap revenues from online that are even greater than those which their printed products or broadcast services generated at the start of the 21st Century or at least compensated for any losses they incurred as consumers shifted media consumption habits to online rather than those traditional products and services. What they hoped clearly hasn’t occurred despite more than a quarter century elapsing. Yet rather than change, or even significantly alter this failed strategy, they mindlessly continue it despite its disastrous effect upon their industries. After all, why change course, even at the last minute, when you instead can go down with the ship? I refer to what I term the ‘shovelware strategy’. The Mass Media industries simply shoveled onto websites the contents of their printed products and broadcast services. These industries hoped that consumers would use these websites the same ways (i.e., as frequently and deeply) as consumers had used their printed products and broadcast services during the 20th Century. Compounding that hope, the industries likewise shoveled onto these websites their theories, doctrines, business models, and traditional practices of Mass Media Newspapers were the first sector of these industries to implement the shovelware strategy. They encountered personal computer-mediated technologies during the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of news ticker scrolls in videotext; then as textual news stories in teletext experiments during the late 1970s through the 1980s; then in the form of third-party proprietary online services from then until 2000. When the Internet opened for public usage and the first multimedia […]