cjboffoli
Newspapers are failing because they are blunt tools that need to have broad appeal for the entire audience, versus news delivered by modern methods that can be fine tuned in terms of relevance to the person on the receiving end. The generations coming up behind us already have been shown to have a much greater capacity for processing vast amounts of information. Parsing out relevant information will grow increasingly more important in an age when the amount of available information is ever expanding. And algorithms for bringing us new (but still relevant) information will only improve too.
Advertising will need to do much more to adapt to this reality too and because of inertia it simply hasn’t yet changed enough. Advertising seems to be everywhere these days and yet no one in that industry can exactly explain why ad revenue is dropping calamitously in virtually every market. Tech savvy people (using devices like Tivo) have made an art of skipping over commercials during their favorite television shows. But I don’t think it is the commercials themselves that are the problem. It is that they are not adequately tuned to the audience. Why should I (a man in my 30’s) sit there and waste my time watching commercials for Tampax, Lipitor and dozens of other products that have absolutely no relevance or appeal to me? People with an inflated sense of importance immediately whinge about privacy the second this issue is raised, but I for one will be all for tuning the advertising message to my personal tastes and demographics through interactive technologies.
It is interesting that Sarah Palin’s name is still being floated out there when it’s clear that she’s well on her way to just being another footnote in Presidential history. I don’t really have any strong feelings for Sarah Palin either way. But apropos of the earlier discussion about thinking independently, I wonder how much of what we saw in the media was really about her ability and how much was a result of the old media’s endlessly sexist presentation of women as one of two archetypes: the bitch or the ditz.