The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators
August 16, 2009 at 12:41 PM EDT
Here we go again . The newspaper industry is blaming online news aggregators for its dwindling profits and inability to adapt to a world of links and truly-free flowing information. (They like it when information flows freely into their pages, but not so much when it flows out). On Thursday, paidContent ran an essay by media consultant Arnon Mishkin called "The Fallacy Of The Link Economy" which was misguided on so many levels . The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked. But it didn't matter because you'd gladly pay a dollar to read the one or two stories that caught your eye on the front page, hoping there would be more inside. Well, guess what? The media bundle is dead. News sites can no longer capture reader's attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck