The Time for the Mass Media Industries to Awake to Reality
More than 20 years ago, the Mass Media industries myopically and thus catastrophically bet their future on the wrong path adapting to personal computer-mediated technologies. Subscribe to the Digital Deliverance newsletter and learn how and why.
The Mass Media industries mistook prerequisites and superficialities, such as ‘convergence’, ‘digital first,’ and ‘do what you do best and link to the rest,’ as the major and ultimate metamorphoses that these technologies wrought in the media environment. They expected the websites that they built would yield net profits equal or larger than their printed or broadcast services and products had earned, thereby sustaining themselves into the future. Despite forewarnings, they shortsightedly failed to perceive and comprehend ever much greater (indeed, epochal) changes that were then already underway. Some of the Mass Media industries have blithely trod this rapidly quickly obsolete path for more than a quarter century, despite it having so obviously led them into disaster and accelerating towards their eventual doom.
With exceedingly rare exceptions, these industries in developed nations have now lost more than half their consumer audiences (readerships, listenerships, or viewerships), more than two-thirds their advertising clientele, and more than half their gross revenues when the numbers are adjusted for population growth or inflation in the economy. Less prideful or less hidebound industries would long ago have realized, nonetheless admitted, that their adaptation strategy to personal computer-mediated technologies is a deluded debacle and instantly alter strategy.
The disaster is an industrial-scale example of the Einstellung Effect — a cognitive bias in which executives who aren’t used to rapid or a radical change employ outmoded but familiar methods to solve unprecedented problems, doing so even when they’ve been forewarned that more appropriate or efficient new solutions exists. In the cases of the Mass Media industries, they formulated, implemented, and have continued an adaptation strategy that might have seemed to them relevant during the 1990s but which subsequently failed to keep abreast even greater changes that the ever accelerating developments in computer-mediated technologies have wrought since then.
The Digital Deliverance newsletter (itself ironically a continuation of the 1990s one) will explain:
- What wrong path the Mass Media industries took;
- Why that path was wrong;
- What those industries should instead have done;
- How those industries own journalists and academicians inadvertently hampered their industries’ successful adaptation
- What opportunities the Mass Media industries might be able to salvage.
Consequently, it will also explain what are now called Individuated Media, which in effect are a new and unprecedented genus of media, that have already replaced the Mass Media as the predominant means by which most people in the world obtain news, entertainment, and other information, and why that is demonstrably so.
In English-language idiom, that’s known as ‘a tall order’. Why should I be writing it and you be reading it? Compare my credential against those of others who would purport to explain these things:
• My name is Vin Crosbie. I’ve worked for the past 32 years full-time advising the Mass Media industries how to adapt to personal computer-mediated technologies. (For the prior 15 years, I was an executive with News Corp., Reuters, the original United Press International, the owner of a daily newspaper, and the fifth generation of my family in the media management business.) My consulting company Digital Deliverance, LLC, is 30 years old. I’ve consulted to media clients on five continents.
• The decade-year-old International Journal of New Media Studies requested my permission to use my seminal 2002 essay What is New Media? as the very first thing it published.
• I’ve co-chaired and co-moderated the World Association of News Publishers’ Beyond the Printed Word conference in Vienna, as well as been a speaker at most of the developed world’s major media conferences.
• I’ve given the Republic of Singapore’s Annual Media Lecture in its National Library auditorium, with an introduction by Singapore’s President.
• I was the first person, only industry consultant, and only academician, quoted in the Congressional Research Service’s report The U.S. Newspaper Industry in Transition, to brief the U.S. Congress about that industry’s disastrous problems adapting to the future.
• My speech to the National Association of Broadcasters conference was one of 23 orations — including speeches by Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton — selected by a team of speech professors for publication in the anthology Representative American Speeches.
• Despite lacking any university or college degrees, I was enlisted in 2007 by Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, America’s premiere school of broadcasting, to write and teach New Media Business, a resaired course for master’s degree students in New Media and in Media Management. I continued as that course’s exclusive teacher until 2021 when I retired from the grind of scheduled teaching of graduate students and returned to consulting. I’ve also taught similar courses at Rhodes University in South Africa; and lectured at Peking and Tsinghua universities in China and at the University of Southern California, University of California at Berkeley, University of Missouri, and Virginia Commonwealth University in the U.S.A.
• At their invitation, I’ve presented academic papers at the biennial World Media Economics and Management Conferences and at the International Media Academics Association. Much of what I will explain in this newsletter has been published in the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, among other scholarly journals.
As you can tell by my tone at the start of this very newsletter, I am direct and radically dissident from my consulting competitors or other media professors. I realistically expect that what I write will cause controversy and result in outrage or rejection by the very people who caused the Mass Media industries to trod for more than two decades along the wrong path into the 21st Century. Those industries’ wake-up call is overdue. Read and hear it now!