People are not going online to consume mass media,they do so to consume their own favoured mix of content

Part 2 of Vin Crosbie's look at the decline of US newspapers is now available and as with Part 1 it is worth a read.

You may recall that in Part 1 Crosbie said that newspapers had failed to adapt the new supply and demand.He expands this point in Part 2

The understanding of economics, particularly media economics, has never been its strong suit, except if the topic is how many tons of newsprint to buy, how many points a major stock market dropped, or how cut expenses to match revenues

So what is the model?

Well Crosbie goes back to the dawn of print when

Consumers had little or no supply of daily news until the daily newspaper. So to produce newspapers, the adaption of Gutenberg's book printing technology spread quickly worldwide

Today the model has been turned on its head but

today's analog printing technology still has the same limitation that it had in Gutenberg's days - it produces the same edition for everyone.

and thus

many, if not most, of the stories that the editors select under this criterion vary greatly in actual relevance for individual readers

In his first essay Crosbie had made it clear that it is not the new media that is killing the newspaper industry

The answer is, no, the fact that those daily newspapers' contents are now available for free on the Internet is not why American daily newspapers are dying. The answer is, yes, the fact that the Internet (aided by topical magazines and topical channels from cable and satellite television) provides any person an extraordinarily better and more articulate way to satisfy his individual interests than any generically-aimed product such as the general-interest newspaper can do is why American daily newspapers are dying.

but what is the argument here.

1.

The consumers, not media companies, led adoption of Internet. During the 1990s, media companies followed millions of consumers onto the Internet. No media companies invented the Internet as a medium

2.The assumption from the media that

people want to consume the same types of news and information online was in print think that a major reason why people are abandoning print and going online is because online is a form of traditional print on electronic steroids.

is wrong for

The vast majority tell surveys that newspapers and magazines are still much more convenient and easier to read in printed format than online

3.

The data about usage clearly indicates that people don't go online primarily to consume Mass Media.

So the conclusion seems simple.People are not going online to consume mass media,they do so to consume their own favoured mix of content and that mix is different for every individual.Thus

At root, this is a massive distribution problem. Stories about which specific people may be interested exist, but aren't being distributed to them by newspapers due to the limitations of a technology that was invented when horses were the only form of transportation on our streets