Vin Crosbie's Personal Blog

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

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When the Doom of Mass Media Became Apparent

Vin

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 […]

Bezos & Bogeymen

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 […]

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Seeking a Shorter Commute

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Although I’m scheduled in late August to start my eleventh consecutive academic year teaching New Media Business, a required course which I wrote and for which I am the sole instructor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication’s master’s degree in New Media Management curriculum at Syracuse University, I’m seeking either a supplemental or else full-time academic position closer to New York City area. Or in any U.S. or foreign major city having a hospital that can provide excellent outpatient care for my disabled wife. When my wife became disabled in 2010, doctors at the three hospitals in Syracuse told her that the she required specialized care that only hospitals in New York City, Boston, or other larger cities could provide. So, she and I moved to the New York City suburbs, where we’d lived before each taking teaching positions at Syracuse, and I began commuting weekly back to Syracuse (a 500-mile/800 kilometer round-trip) to teach postgraduate New Media Management. But I am now almost a decade older and have grown fatigued of that eight-hour weekly round-trip, even to job I love. I would like to teach either closer to where I now live or else move to a new major city with a shorter commute. I’m enthused to teach more graduate students in Syracuse this autumn; yet I think that, either this coming academic year or during the 2020-21 one, I should begin teaching elsewhere rather than continuing so overly-long weekly commute. Moreover, as my wife and I have ‘downsized’ our household as we’ve grown older (and because she is a dual citizen of the US and the EU) we’re open to the possibilities of living and teaching elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad. If you know of anything apropos, please let me know.