The old media are dying. They won't be missed.

Here is a great article about how the old media just don't understand about the web. It makes many very good points.
http://www.bspcn.com/2010/06/11/5-things-old-media-still-doesnt-get-about-the-web/

The initial anecdote in this story just about says it all. The NY Times forced an app that showed NY Times headlines (and directed traffic to the NY Times website) to be pulled from the Apple App store. There are so many things wrong in this sentence, I hardly know where to begin. Who is more clueless here? The NY Times for objecting to an app that drives traffic to its website? Or Apple for pulling such an app and demonstrating once again that they could not care less about their users?

The article goes on to make these five basic points, all of which I completely agree with:
1. People Never Wanted to Pay for the News
2. Paywalls Break the Web and Annoy Your Customers
3. The Web Needs New Solutions, Not Digital Replicas of Print
4. People Pirate Because They Get a Better Experience
5. Filesharing and Piracy Do Not Always Represent Lost Sales

As a simple follow-up to the third point, about doing more than simply providing digital replicas of the print edition, I continue to be amazed that online articles often don't post links relevant to the story being discussed. I mentioned this before in my Ice Cream and Immigration post. In that case, they didn't post a link to the law in question so readers could simply read it for themselves. Amazing.

Now, and in the future, we will get our news from multiple dispersed sources, not centralized sources. It will be critically important to understand the bias that these sources bring to their news stories. It will be important not only to get information but also to evaluate the quality of that information.

This is really something we should have been doing all along (and some of us have). But there are others who still blindly rely on old media. Thankfully, their numbers appear to be decreasing, based on decreasing newspaper circulation number, declining network news ratings, and so forth.

Typical old media outlets insult our intelligence by telling us that they have no bias, even when this is obviously not true. (Remember Dan Rather? Neither does anyone else.) Now that we have alternatives, they are paying the price for this arrogance. Amazingly, in the face of these changes they refuse to see the writing on the wall and make the necessary changes. Good riddance.


I would also build on the final main point in the article, that filesharing and piracy do not always result in lost sales. Back in the days of Napster (yes, I was around back then, and I used it!) I downloaded a fair amount of music. I did it to try out new artists. If I found an artist I liked, I bought their album. I bought more music when I used Napster than at any other time of my life, and it was because of Napster.