Tendências:
Taking the paper out of newspapers: News companies need to come to terms with the fact that they are "in the business of writing news, not necessarily printing it on paper." That's the premise advocated by media mogul Rupert Murdoch -- who just added the popular myspace.com, a huge mainstream blogging/social networking site, to his portfolio, which includes TV and radio stations, and dozens of newspapers around the globe.
But English-speaking newspaper companies, in particular, may find this transition difficult to swallow, especially since, according to Columbia University media expert Eli Noam, English is one of the rare languages where the word "newspaper" actually has the word "paper" in it. In other languages, the linguistic concept itself is not so directly tied to a mass-market wood-based product.
Hundreds of magazines launch, but few survive: More than 1,000 new titles were launched last year, including Men?s Vogue, Hollywood Dog and Poker Life.
By May of this year, nearly 300 more had hit the bookstore shelves, testing the waters of fickle consumerism, with Fertility Today, Real Fighter and Wine Adventure among them.
So many promising glossy pages. So little time.
More than half of them won?t survive their first year ? in fact, 63 percent will die a public death, predicts Samir Husni, chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi.
On The Sunny Side Of The Street: Because believe it or not, in 2006 Wall Street likes Big Media. Year to date, the Bloomberg Media Index [...] has far outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index -- 7.7% to 1.2%, as of June 9.
All Web sites are alike. Regardless of their owners, they can all do the same set of things. In that fact lies the profound crisis facing all aspects of the media industry. [...]
Coke can release music; ABC can publish articles; and Forbes or The New York Times can broadcast video.
In Media, Rex: So meet the SOMSM -- State-Owned Mainstream Media. You know, like PBS, only more so. Now wait just a second, you might be thinking -- the same governments that gave us the Post Office are going to give us the news? How could that be? [...]
Every country with ambitions on the international stage will soon have its own state-supported media.
If war is too important to be left to generals, then news is too important to be left to reporters. Governments, including ours, have their own ideas, and they want to share them with us, the people -- like it or not.
In addition, around the world, states will want to "help" their media. Not satisfied with what the free market is bringing about, politicians will offer to help out the invisible hand -- help it, that is, with their own iron fist.
