My recent post We, the people, need a strong media, saw several good comments but Tom Kieffer provided a link (Clay Shirky) that led me to an essay by Nicholas Carr The Great Unbundling: Newspapers and the Net. It’s worth a read and really got me thinking about any content offering staying viable today, whether it’s newspapers, TV, magazines, blogs or even a small newsletter for a highly targeted market.

Carr outlines near the beginning, "The shift from scarcity to abundance in media means that, when it comes to deciding what to read, watch, and listen to, we have far more choices than our parents or grandparents did. We’re able to indulge our personal tastes as never before, to design and wrap ourselves in our own private cultures. The vast array of choices is exciting, and by providing an alternative to the often bland products of the mass media it seems liberating as well. It promises, as Chris Anderson writes in The Long Tail, to free us from “the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare” and establish in its place “a world of infinite variety.”

Though he starts out talking about the "economics of culture," he quickly gets into an examination of the issues surrounding content abundance (i.e., new media) and the economics of traditional media and the unbundling of it in an online age as it pertains to newspapers. I was confused as to the point of his essay since media downtrending is obvious and I was hoping he’d posit a fundamental or obvious solution.

I still think newspapers need blog networks but those thoughts are a tactical manifestation of a larger strategic one: in an age where content is a commodity and extremely simple to create and distribute, those who can edit, classify, aggregate and harness content will add value to that content and gain a critical, mass audience, enjoy monetization opportunities and remain viable.

[Read more...]