Very excellent and insightful piece on the past and future of “news and advertising in the 21st century” by Dan Conover at Xark …
What I’m challenging is the prevailing wisdom that because advertising shaped and subsidized journalism in the 20th century, the reinvention of journalism in the 21st century is simply a matter of re-balancing online ad rates with newsroom overhead. Those rates are lower because audiences have fractured and we’re never going to reverse that trend, so it follows that if your only revenue plan for producing original journalistic content is selling Web ads beside it, you’d better learn to make that content cheaper and more sensational than your already cheap, sensational competitors.
… and this bit is also good…
The future is not knowable, but let’s be clear about the lessons of history. The assumption that the future will look like the past is based on an illusion that time routinely treats with disdain.
Smart guy, good insights. – P
