i was listening to the radio and the dj started announcing some “celebrity news” (more like gossip), it was pretty useless to me, not because it wasn’t interesting but because i had read about all this stuff 2-3 days before on the net. so that got me thinking how useless traditional media is.

i used to buy magazines, but there’s no point anymore because all the content that i want to read is on the net. i can see magazines keeping readership by not publishing specific high-profile articles on the net (like say university rankings); but for most things i’m looking for (like reviews and previews), if they’re not on one site they’re on another. it’s even worse for newspapers. the news is reported more or less the same everywhere (ok it’s different in the states, but aside from that…) and if you’re looking for commentary and opinion columns, that’s what the net’s made for.

then there’s radio. radio’s basically a shill for recording companies. so if you actually want to listen to music that you like, and not what the record companies say you like, you would get the music yourself thru mp3s or what not.

so basically you can get everything free on the net. once the general populace realizes and starts doing this, traditional media will be in trouble if they don’t adapt. you can actually see this happening by looking at the music industry.

of course the key idea is that it’s free, but it’s been proven countless times that the everything-for-free model of business doesn’t really work that well. so the question is what will happen if everyone moves to the net and then all the free content disappears? who knows!

i think there will always be free information on the net, but large sites like bbc or nytimes might become subscription based. it obviously wouldn’t make sense to provide your content for free on the net when your physical copy (where the content was originally created for) doesn’t pay for itself. so that might be a nice little problem we will create for ourselves in the future.

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