In Warren's Words

The Handwriting on the Wall

Predictions are dangerous and the laws of unintended consequences always thwart them. Frequently they are wrong, but that doesn’t prevent people from making prognostications based on prevailing facts, personal observations and experiences, anecdotal evidence, and gut feelings. Although I believe I am spot on, as the Brits say, I ask your indulgence.

The mass media as we knew it is slowly expiring.

Newspapers are going through the agonies of a slow death. They are losing their audiences for obvious reasons. Young people are turning away from newspapers, getting their information in encapsulated form on the internet and television.  Older people, too, seduced by the internet and websites more suited to their niche, are moving away from the traditional media.

Another factor, rarely discussed, is the strange disconnect between the news and advertising, especially in the prestigious newspapers, like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. The New York Times, for example, pursuing a populist, leftist editorial policy championing the rights of the underprivileged, serves a completely different audience in its advertising, which is directed at the over privileged and elite.

The niche is in, the mass media is out.

The people The Times champions, by and large, do not read the newspaper and, for the most part cannot afford the goods and entertainment products it hawks to its audience. I keep wondering how many of the folks they root for can afford a ten thousand dollar bracelet from Bulgari or a hundred dollar ticket to a Broadway show, zealously and repeatedly advertised within its pages. Indeed, how many of the people who would be the recipients of the largesse it supports for the underclass can even afford a subscription to the paper.

This disconnect seems to afflict the news magazine business as well, which is another dinosaur headed for extinction along with other general interest magazines. Content aside, the proliferation of television channels, and the overwhelming competition from other amusements like computer games and other exploding advances in technology will eventually force one’s attention to niche areas of interest, making it impossible to reach a wide audience with a one size fits all message.

Advertisers are busy looking for other spots to hawk their messages. We wear their logos on our clothes without charge. Buildings, stadiums, parks and other visible public edifices are now being named after businesses and products. Expect more and more venues to sport business’ logos and product names. Not an inch of public space will be safe from advertisers, including airplanes and all forms of public transportation.

Movie theaters are forcing their customers to watch endless commercials. Cell phones will soon explode with text, moving pictures and jingles hawking products. News sites will give you a TV report live or canned but first you will have to watch a commercial. Expect ads to appear on prescription drug labels, on doctor’s prescription forms, on alarm clocks, and proliferate on old standbys like food packages, book pages, school supplies.

Niche content is king.

Expect it on autos as well. You will soon see ads on walls and sidewalks and through projections in the sky. Ads will begin to appear on the most unlikely places, condoms and toilet paper, even the sides of grazing animals like sheep and cows will not be immune.  With the demise of the mass media advertisers need eyeballs and they will put their stamp on everything in sight. The human skin might be next. Think of it, a Coke or Pepsi paid ad as a tattoo.  Here are unintended consequences in full glory.      

Other media will be affected as well. All content will be targeted. Tip O’Neil said that all politics is local. This is what he meant.

In the end, it will be niche content that is king while the methods of its delivery via paper books, paper magazines and movie images in auditoriums will shrink as new delivery systems proliferate. The publishing business, for example, will eventually crumble before a vast tidal wave of people who will have been getting their content on screens while they are barely out of diapers. Their allegiance to the paper book will not have the emotional heft of older generations.

The days of the big-box bookstore are numbered as more friendly electronic reading devices hit the market. Anything printed on paper will eventually disappear as digital flexible paper hits the marketplace, sooner than later. Of course, the visionary thinkers in the print and paper industry know this is coming, despite emotional disclaimers to the contrary. They know they are trapped in dying industries, but hope that the bottom line might not shrink to panic levels before the inevitable changes take place.

People who earn their living in those industries are sitting on a melting mountain and know it. Many are scrambling to find ways to keep the mountain from melting too fast, but eventually they will lose the struggle. Bottom line: the niche is in; the mass media is out. Of course a niche could stretch into a super-niche. Just ask the guy who thought up Starbucks. 

This is not meant to be a message of gloom and doom.  It is the coming reality. Nothing can change it. These are my predictions. 

There is a saving grace, however, and since I am a writer of stories, there is some reason for personal optimism. Words, written and spoken will remain the quintessential tools of communications. Like death and taxes, the what-happens-next story, however delivered, will live as long as humans survive on the planet.

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