Snapshots From The (Media) Revolution

Whether intentional or not, the Business Day section of each Monday’s New York Times has become a great collection of snapshots on the conflicted landscape of old and new media.

This was especially true this week and is worth a quick review if you missed it:

An article by Ashlee Vance details a new service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud which hooks vanity publishing up with cloud computing. The service allows content creators to plug into a network of high speed, high quality digital printers and produce their own short run glossy magazines. Similar technology can also be used for short run book publishing. The Long Tail comes to print.

The MagCloud piece was opposite an item detailing the troubles that may soon see shuttering of the San Francisco Chronicle, which lost 30 percent of its circulation between 2003 – 2008, while another article details how daily papers in Europe are allegedly doing a better job than their U.S. brethren in weathering the internet storm.

Struggling to maintain a hold on eyeballs isn’t just limited to newspapers. Media analyst David Carr has a column on what he calls the “hyperbolic rhythms” of cable news as they try to retain viewership numbers after the flush of November’s TV-friendly election campaign.

Next to Carr’s is a feature entitled “Why Pay For Cable?” which outlines how rapid gains in online viewing of television programming is shifting the ground beneath cable and network TV operators...

where have all my subscribers gone?... Uh, check Hulu and Boxee... (Can we cut a deal with those guys?).

There’s an article by Matt Richtel on how the video game industry (one of the $$$ bright spots of the media world) is under assault from the proliferation of free or low cost games on the web and the explosion of new hand-held devices. “The model as it exists today is dying,” says one video game industry exec.

But wait, there’s more: An article about how Skype, the internet calling service is moving aggressively to bring cheap calls to mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Another on the chatter on how microblogging wonder-site Twitter might monetize and an Associated Press story on a Huffington Post initiative to fund investigative journalism on the nation’s economy. There’s also, a short item on a big deal between Sony and AMC Entertainment to bring digital projectors to movie theaters; this means that movie houses will soon down load movies direct from satellites or the cloud and goodbye film. Such a move has the potential to reshape the traditional movie theater.

Someone said that newspapers are the first draft of history. When it comes to the evolution of the media world NYT's business section has been doing a lively job of late. This is (advertising subsidized) content I would (an do) pay for and would much rather read on newsprint while having breakfast. Keeps crumbs off the keyboard.