Thursday, April 21, 2005

The future of dead-tree publishing

Power Line, in a piece entitled: Robert Burns, call your office, has quoted what I think is the best-put, most succinct (always a desirable quality) yet forceful argument for the ascendancy of electronic publishing. MSM, with their ludicrous blend of rigidity, now-obvious bias, a pervasive animus to things Webby, and most embarrassingly, a rather visible lack of intellectual horsepower compared to their on-line nemeses, are in the cross hairs.

From my own reading patterns over the last three years or so, future media will concentrate on things very local; the penetrating and real-time analysis will be Web-based; thoughtful pieces in quality journals such as Atlantic Monthly will live on; and there will continue to be niche magazines, in fact ever nicher.

But as the Powerline piece notes, trying to cover all bases, as the dead-tree newspapers and general purpose magazines (like our own funny little Listeria, ht NZPundit) is a recipe for irrelevance.

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