I’ve Revamped and Rebranded the Digital Deliverance newsletter to Focus on What has Already Superseded the Mass Media as Consumers’ Predominant Way of Obtaining News, Entertainment, and Other information.
As old dogs such as me get older, we sometimes forget the new tricks we had learned.
“You’re publishing a newsletter to teach media executives the lessons that you taught in graduate school? Won’t this confuse people who instead expect a newsletter that comments about news and current events in the media industries? Moreover, you’ve devoted the past 20 years your life to recognizing the rise of Individuated Media. So, why not call it that rather than brand it with the name of your 30-year-old consulting company.”
So, welcome to the Individuated Media newsletter (formerly Digital Deliverance newsletter). I’ve revamped and rebranded it. The many lessons I wrote and taught in my required course for New Media Management master’s degree students (an elective for doctoral candidates) at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I’m instead converting to podcasts and videos for this newsletter’s paying subscribers—a better way to differentiate what they get from what free subscribers receive.
I’ve increased this newsletter’s frequency to more than weekly. And I’ve also changed its tone. I had been these past years publishing academic publications such the International Journal of New Media Studies, the Nordic Journal of Media Management, the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, etc., rather than media industry trade journals. Academic writing is virtually required to be bulletproof and concrete, particularly because any dissident or non-conformist articles get attacked by the hidebound or philistine. Yet that can tend to make academic writing sometimes as heavy and ineffective as the Maginot Line. My career started 50 years ago in journalism, in which writing should be short and snappy, particularly in a newsletter. Here we go!
I’ve a reputation of not taking prisoners at conferences, symposia, and seminars about ‘New Media’. I’d rather immediately kill a faulty idea or unsound strategy than let those go viral. However, I regret that wasn’t faithful to that hygienic practice during an online journalism conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. The result is that I’m today writing about a misguided strategy that has cancerously metastasized since.
In my opening remarks as that day’s co-moderator of the conference, I warned against the Mass Media industries pursuing a strategy that I’ll now outline below. Unfortunately for conference attendees, my co-moderator subsequent opening remarks started with “Forget all of what Vin has said. That doesn’t matter. Do what [journalism] you do best and [hyper]link to the rest.” I thought that was crudely impolite and unprofessional. I should have immediately disputed him publicly, but I saw that most attendees preferred his simplistic fantasy for online success.
- What follows are the results.
For more than 30 years, they have myopically misperceived how the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies has transformed the world’s media environment. The empirical evidence and verifiable data proving my statement is gargantuan and blatantly inescapable.
The Mass Media industries first encountered those technologies during the 1990s (let’s forget the proprietary online services, videotext, and teletext years, although we can certainly include those, too). It was a time when consumers’ access to online required them to plug their wired telephone line into a modem.
- For what purpose would these industries use the technologies?
They fundamentally mistook the technologies as ways to create online versions of their printed products or broadcast services. A website became equivalent to a periodical’s edition. Its webpages to printed pages. Printed ‘right-on-page’ (‘ROP’) advertisements became banner ads. For the broadcaster, the website became the online source of recorded video clips or the live ‘stream’ of that station or network. Etcetera.
Virtually all sectors of the Mass Media industries were so confident that online could be the ‘digital’ equivalent of their printed products or broadcast services that they also believed that their traditional business models of those products and services could simply be transplanted and succeed there.
The publishers hoped that online would eliminate their costs of purchasing, printing, and distributing paper products. The broadcasters hoped that online would eliminate their costs and regulatory hassles of operating transmitter or dealing with cable or satellite system intermediaries to reach consumers. The Mass Media industries believed that online might eventually generate annual net revenues equal or greater than what their printed products or broadcast services had previously generated.
Those were the goals and practices for online that the Mass Media industries set in the mid-1990s.
- In my graduate school teachings, I referred to this as the ‘Shovelware Strategy’.
The Mass Media industries thought what was needed for this to succeed was that consumers acquire sufficiently fast online access so that the industries could deliver to them texts, still photos, graphical page layouts, animations, audio, and video simultaneously, and without monopolizing consumers’ home telephone lines. The industries termed this ‘convergence’ because all the industries’ sectors would become capable of multimedia and compete in ways they previously couldn’t.
They achieved that situation starting in circa 2005 when approximately half of the households and businesses in developed nations had acquired ‘always-on’ broadband Internet access. Consumers had become ‘hooked-up’, ‘wired’, and everything seemed to become ‘digital’.
The Mass Media industries’ executives who implemented the Shovelware Strategy were lauded as ‘New Media Pioneers’; promoted into their corporate suites; or retired on their pensions and laurels.
The Mass Media industries, particularly those run by executives inculcated in the concept of three-to-five-year business plans, settled back in what they then believed would be the Shovelware Strategy’s start of a ‘Mature’ phase during which net profits would start growing.
- The Reality.
Yet as billions of consumers worldwide shifted media consumption habits away from print and broadcast and to online, the Shovelware Strategy incontrovertible failed.
Rather than continue to use the Mass Media industries’ websites, those billions of consumers, as well as the advertisers attracted to them, chose to use the online services of ‘search engines’, ‘social media’, and other innovative startup companies that provided each of those consumers with an individualized mix of news, entertainment, and other information that better match each of those individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media company’s products, services, or feed can. Billions of consumers chose to use the websites of companies that produced Individuated Media rather than the websites of the Mass Media industries.
In the March 19th edition of this newsletter this year, I showed how empirical data in 2007 demonstrated that the Shovelware Strategy wasn’t working. And I explained in the March 10th edition how Individuated Media came to supersede Mass Media as the predominant means by which most of the world’s consumers now obtain news, entertainment, and other information. No need to explain those further now.
The overall results of the Shoveware Strategy are that the Mass Media industries worldwide have lost literally hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenues during the past 20 years of applying the Shovelware Strategy. For example, the U.S. daily newspaper industry’s annual revenues have declined from US$44 billion to less than $18 billion during that period, an aggregate loss of more than $600 billion. During these disastrous 20 years, the Shovelware Strategy has generated merely $3 billion in annual revenues, with stagnant growth during the past decade.
The results of the Shovelware Strategy have been so bad that in less than three weeks, the 250-year old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, once one of the 25 largest daily newspapers in the U.S., will cease publishing print and online.
As for the remaining 24 largest daily newspapers, during 2025 they lost an average of 13.3-percent of their remaining print edition circulation, ranging from 21.2-percent at The Washington Post to 5.3-percent at the Bridgeport Connecticut Post. (I note that while the Bridgeport newspaper now has the 24th largest circulation among the remaining approximately 1,100 daily newspapers in the U.S., its print circulation is merely 34,000.)
Such declines are only a U.S. phenomenon. Click here to see a chart of the circulation declines of the national newspapers published by Reach Plc (former Trinity Mirror), one of the largest publishers of newspapers in the U.K.
- My Dare
I publicly challenge any Mass Media industry executive to dispute that what I’ve written above means that they are zombies. (I don’t care how senior the executive nor how cushy his corporate accounterments are.)
Why specifically are executives of the Mass Media industries the walking dead?
Because intelligent businesspeople abandon failed strategies; discern what caused the failure; then devise and implement a new strategy that corrects that failure. Permit me to state a frank truth: braindead businesspeople don’t.
The first empirical evidence of the Shovelware Strategy’s failure surfaced nearly 20 years ago. Since then, it has failed to produce what the Mass Media industries hoped it would. What nowadays are Mass Media executives waiting for? Another nearly 20 years to pass? The concrete results of the strategy’s failure clearly indicate that their businesses will cease to exist by then. What the executives of the Mass Media industries are nowadays doing is staggering in a zombie-like coma towards their industries’ doom.
In the next newsletter, which I plan to send later this week, I’ll begin detailing the solution for these industries. It’s the sum of what I know after working in the media industries for 47 years, of which 32 years were consulting on five continents and teaching at the postgraduate level about how the Mass Media industries should adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies worldwide. It is an integrated, multimedia, multinational, and Open Source solution how to transact, track, and invoice the usage of every type and form of contents, so that each individual consumer received a unique feed of news, entertainment, and other information, that better matches his or her individual mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media industries’ products or service. You might be surprised to learn that most media’s major usage of Artificial Intelligence won’t be in newsrooms or to create contents.
What it will require is a change in paradigm from the Industrial Era’s Mass Media theories, doctrines, practices, and contents packaging. I’ll end this newsletter edition with a similar example of such a paradigm shift:
When Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type press created the Mass Media, the monks in scriptoria, who laboriously hand-copied books, view that new technology as an existential threat and considered Gutenberg’s machine profane. Yet during the subsequent few decades they couldn’t compete with it. So, their employment and industry ended.
What those monks should have done is purchase one of Gutenberg’s presses. Although they wouldn’t have been able to print the magnificently illustrated Bibles they formerly produced, each of which took months or years to produce, a press would have enabled them to produce hundreds of basic Bibles in that same time. The error the monks in the scriptoria made was they thought their purpose was to produce magnificently illustrated Bibles for the few when in reality their purpose was to spread the ‘word of God’ to all.
Nowadays, I deal with mobs of media executives and old-fashioned content creators who zombie-like believe their purpose is to produce and package news, entertainment, and other information, in virtually the ways that their predecessors in previous centuries did. They fail to realize that their real purpose is to use the best possible technologies to deliver whatever mix of contents will best satisfy each individual consumers needs, interests, and tastes.
That is also the most lucrative path to success.
Share The Individuated Media newsletter
The Individuated Media newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.