Two of the top tech observers are drumming a death march for Yahoo in the wake of yesterday’s big announcement that the company had struck a search advertising deal with arch-enemy Google. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Om Malik of GigaOm both think the company has shot itself in the foot (or worse). Arrington:

The deal terms announced with Google appear to be fairly innocent - a non-exclusive arrangement that let’s Yahoo take Google’s ads if and when they choose to, and put them alongside their own ads, and/or other third party ads. But the truth is that this will cause even more advertisers to flee Yahoo’s platform. Which will drive auction-determined ad rates down. Which will drive Yahoo to take more Google ads. Which will…

It’s a vicious cycle and they will have no choice, as a public company, but to rely more and more on Google as time goes on.

Malik echoes Arrington’s feelings in his typically colorful way:

I think this is yet another critical blunder by a company that lost its way back three years ago when then CEO Terry Semel lost interest in the company, putting it on a path of mediocrity. Of course, as one of my gurus once said, in hindsight, everyone is an idiot (or a genius).

And while that might assuage the short term concerns Wall Streeters have, the company is shooting itself in the face with deal. It is a almost like knowing your spouse is going to divorce while standing in the aisle, waiting for the priest.

Arrington went on to argue that this deal hurts more than just Yahoo; it hurts everybody in Silicon Valley, because competition in the search space means better value for publishers. It’s hard to argue with that, but his blind spot — and frankly that of all Valleyites — is their failure to understand the potential for competing with Google at the local level. And to that, I’ll say, “We’ll see.”

For members of the Yahoo newspaper (and TV) consortium, this deal is likely creating some serious stomach churn. The long-term value prop for local media is Yahoo’s reach, which is a tricky beast that has a lot to do with brand and the fickle happiness of users. It’s hard to believe the company can keep up with the relentless pace of web development when it’s struggling with revenue problems downstream. As I have said all along, Yahoo needs the local media companies a whole lot more than the local companies need Yahoo, and this deal makes that even clearer.

So what the deal with Google means is uncertainty but probably not enough to disrupt the relationship at this point.

But the one certainty that the Web brings is change, and I’d be a fool to predict where this is all headed. I will repeat, however, that online revenue growth is guaranteed at the local level, and that the real competitor of all local media companies is Google, the company that Yahoo just snuggled up against.

It’s almost entertaining to watch, this disconnect between media companies and the Web. In fact, it would be entirely entertaining if so much wasn’t at stake.

Diane Mermigas writes of the problem media moguls are having with the inability to make money with online videos. Former Disney chairman Michael Eisner is frustrated, both as an investor and a participant, and Diane does her best to get her arms around it.

The online ad frontier is fraught with problems–from enraging members of a social network to easy misplacement of ads. (Eisner complained that a male enhancement drug ad was automatically targeted for and appeared with an episode of “Foreign Body.”) Other revenue sources must be created: from sponsorships and transaction-related fees to various forms of sharing revenue and costs.

The answers are found in shifting the online focus from the value of the content and the advertising to the value of connecting to and continuously transacting with the right consumer.

Um, huh? You see, folks, the problem is that the Web collapses every hierarchical attempt to control it, so while traditional media types search for the “formula” that will turn it into a money tree, the Web just sticks its tongue out at them. As a result, the whole media world — including the advertising industry — is unwilling or unable to participate in the very disruption that could save them.

It’s a disconnect, and there’s no other way to explain it.

For example, Zachary Rodgers at ClickZ penned a nice piece last week about signs of growth with RSS advertising. On balance, it’s an encouraging article, but RSS advertising is an uphill, almost vertical climb due to low adoption rates in the U.S. and its inability to serve the flashier types of ads.

…the U.S. ranks far down on the adoption list, with penetration of only 18.6 percent. That’s tiny compared to RSS-addicted nations like Russia (57 percent adoption), Brazil (55 percent) and China (54 percent). Additionally, of those who access feeds, only 25 percent of U.S. respondents said they do so daily. Another 35 percent said they access them weekly, while 16 percent said feed reading is a monthly endeavor.

The reason the U.S. lags in this arena — as it does with mobile technology — is that the quo wants to protect its status, so it is reluctant to move through even obvious doors. RSS isn’t huge in this country, because the media companies that could benefit most from it refuse to promote it or use it as anything other than a way to draw people back to the walled gardens they know so well. RSS 2.0 is a real communications marvel, but it will never reach its potential until media companies begin to use it and explore its possibilities.

Dave Winer is one of those web geniuses who mainstream people don’t like (or refuse) to hear, but he speaks the truth regarding the Web. One of his core teachings is this: “People come back to places that send them away.” That makes no sense whatsoever to traditional media people, but it is, in fact, what “works” on the Web. Google practices it every day, and so do Yahoo and other forms of quality aggregators. And yet media companies are reluctant to offer outbound links to help users with stories for fear of driving them away.

Like I said. It’s a disconnect.

I hope that from time-to-time you are able to step back from the chaos that seems to be enveloping the media world of late to think about the remarkable opportunities that are before us. We’re living in a new Gutenberg moment, and I hope we don’t miss the forest for the trees.

From a memo to Tribune employees by Sam Zell and Randy Michaels:

What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works. Supply and demand are not in balance, and that manifests itself in two ways:

1. We are not giving readers what they want, and
2. We are printing bigger papers than we can afford to print

First, our publishing business — and to reiterate, it IS a business — needs to retool itself to a customer-centric model. We have now reviewed dozens of reader studies done by Tribune over the years, and they present clear and consistent findings. Readers want:

* Unbiased, honest journalism
* LOCAL consumer and community news
* Maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats

Some of our papers do some of these things well, and some of our papers do them better than others. But, ALL of our papers need to improve in this area. We’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we WILL respond to what they say they want.

From an interview that Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer did with the Washington Post:

What is your outlook for the future of media?

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

10 years?

Yeah. If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point. . . . If we want TV to be more interactive, you’ll deliver it over an IP network. I mean, it’s sort of funny today. My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. . . .

Also in the world of 10 years from now, there are going to be far more producers of content than exist today. We’ve already started to see that certainly in the online world, but we’ve just scratched the surface. . . . I always take my favorite case: I grew up in Detroit. I went to a place called Detroit Country Day School. They’ve got a great basketball team. Why can’t I sit in front of my television and watch the Country Day basketball game when I know darn well it’s being video-recorded at all times? It’s there. It’s just not easy to navigate to.

While these thoughts are terrifying, they are at the same time, exciting. Many print people are dismissing Balmer’s predictions, and I agree that those who make absolute prophecies tend to be wrong far more often than they’re right (2018? I’m not so sure). They point to the fact that free dailies are going like gangbusters in Europe, and that global newspaper circulation is trending upwards. We’ll see.

Regardless, these are incredible times in which we live.

Borrell’s latest data (see below) shows that nearly six in ten local media revenue dollars are going to outside web pureplay companies. Add to that the reality that nearly all of the national online revenue goes to the top ten sites in terms of audience, and you can see that there’s something inherently wrong with traditional media’s approach to online advertising. At this week’s RTNDA backgrounder in Chicago, I heard over and over again that web revenue accounts for less that 5% of a station’s overall revenue, so it’s hard to motivate people to do the job of selling online.

I am increasingly convinced that this is due to the blending of two ad metaphors that don’t belong together, and until this is addressed and remedied, we’re going to continue to flounder online.

The Page Metaphor — the paradigm upon which the print industry is based. It’s understandable that this would form our foundational understanding of the Web and its sites. After all, early iterations of the Web were only text-friendly, so a metaphor was needed, some fundamental way of understanding what was seen in a browser. The reality, however, is that web documents aren’t necessarily pages, so entrepreneurs not bound by this metaphor have been able to do remarkable things.

Most of the sales terms used to sell online display advertising come from the newspaper business: the idea of a fold, valuing ads based on location on the page, banners, skyscrapers, etc. In such a metaphor, tactics used to grow revenue demand the creation of more pages and that “driving” people to interior pages is the logical thing to do from a business perspective. Unfortunately, many media companies find themselves hitting a wall, because content for all those pages doesn’t grow on trees, and there’s increasing evidence that digging through “pages” isn’t the way consumers want to engage online media.

The Static Audience Metaphor — the paradigm upon which the broadcast industry is based. As broadcasting matured — and audiences were abundant — the ad industry decided (and broadcasters went along) that a stable mechanism (metric) could be created using Arbitron or Nielsen audience estimates. Since audiences were very large, it made no sense to use a cost-per-person measurement, and so was born the CPM or “cost per thousand (persons)” method of pricing ads. The foundational necessity for this method is an audience that is passive, static and stable.

This model has been with us for a long time, and it’s something everybody in traditional media understands. When the Web came along, it was natural to view it through this metaphor. Hell, we’re all lazy, and if we could simply transfer the CPM model from one to the other, it would make life so much easier. Unfortunately, web audiences are not only smaller, the measurements aren’t based in estimates; they’re precise to a fault. And the bigger the site, the more reliable the numbers, which helps explain the ad world’s inclination to the top ten sites in terms of reach.

Moreover, web “audiences” are fluid, like a river flowing through the media landscape, picking up bits and pieces of the flora and fauna along its path. Like the audience, our news products need to be river-like, but that’s another story. The point is that the metaphor of a static audience is simply wishful thinking when it comes to the Web.

And the problem, of course, is that the Web is neither print nor broadcasting, and it certainly isn’t enough of a combination of the two to justify what we have today. The existing ad world — with its vast agencies and creative types — wants needs a stable mechanism within which to play, but from both structural and practical perspectives, the Web resists such bonds. Those media companies who are making serious money online have been able to cut themselves free from these metaphors and through hard work, outperform everybody else.

We’re all talking about culture changes within our newsrooms, whether it’s print or broadcast, but until there is a similar culture change within the business side, we’ll likely just spin our wheels. The local media company of the future will be web-centric, but not until making money online fits the medium. What we need is a Web Metaphor.

Don’t miss Jack Shafer’s follow-up to previous pieces about Michael Crichton’s 1993 predictions of the demise of mass media. It’s a worthwhile read:

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Crichton’s 1993 prophecies shocked the media world at the time, and he was certainly off by several years. Nevertheless, I agree with Shafter that it’s “advantage Crichton” at this point.

The “mass” is the problem, because the ability to communicate on a large scale has been separated from the “special” application formerly required, as former FCC Chairman Michael Powell so brilliantly observed in a 2004 Silicon Valley discussion.

Now to be a phone company, you don’t have to weave tightly the voice service into the infrastructure. You can ride it on top of the infrastructure. So if you’re a Vonage, you own no infrastructure. You own no trucks. You roll to no one’s house. They turn voice into a application and shoot it across one of these platforms. And, suddenly, you’re in your business.

And that’s why if you’re the music industry, you’re scared. And if you’re the television studio, movie industry, you’re scared. And if you’re an incumbent infrastructure carrier, you’d better be scared. Because this application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and will change things forever. . . . I have no problem if a big and venerable company no longer exists tomorrow, as long as that value is transferred somewhere else in the economy.

Powell was referring to the telephone business, but the paradigm shift about which he spoke applies to every form of communications today. Couple that with the rise of personal media and you have Crichton’s disappearing mass.

This is why it’s so important for all local media companies to understand what business we’re in. We’re not newspapers, television stations and radio stations; we’re all in the information and entertainment business. If we approach tomorrow “only” as a TV station, for example, we’re living in the problem of disappearing mass and, therefore, completely missing the possibilities.

Here is the latest in my series of essays Local Media in a Postmodern World, and it’s a topic I’ve kind of “written around” over the years.

The Cost of Interaction is a simple concept with complex aspects pertaining to web design and content management, but for local media companies to be relevant downstream, we’re going to have to take a serious look at this.

Just as there are costs in doing business, there are costs in being a consumer. Over the years, we’ve witnessed businesses shifting some of their costs to their customers — think self-service gas, fast food, self check-out at the grocery store or telephone answering systems — but online is a different matter, for consumers have choices here than they don’t have in the “real” world. Therefore, pushing customers in this manner online is a dangerous proposition. A high cost of interaction means less value to users and fewer reasons to return. Conversely, the lower the cost of interaction, the easier and more usable the application, and that means a reason to come back.

An excellent article by the BBC nails the problem many media companies are having trying to move the “frequency” needle in their efforts to build a sustainable mass for marketing.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

The information comes from usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who says most people are “hot potato” driven and just want to get a specific task completed. That’s not good news for sites who want people to explore and discover.

“The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment,” Dr Nielsen told BBC News.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them.

“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen.

“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said.

Media companies would do well to pay attention here, for this is yet another indication that the portal website concept is sinking deeper into the tar pits.

I spend a great deal of time challenging my assumptions, as most of you know. It’s a part of the pomo in me, I guess, but I find the practice useful in times like these, especially in the world of media. And I do a lot of this at 30,000 feet. Perhaps it’s the view. Perhaps it’s the altitude. Perhaps it’s how insignificant I feel up there among the clouds, for insignificance is a fine form of humility that helps keep me balanced.

To be a television broadcaster, one requires a special license. Those suckers are scarce, so it stands to reason that everything about TV would be determined by those in TV. It is, after all, their little corner of the world.

To be a newspaper, one needs a printing press or a ton of cash. That makes newspapers scarce, so it also stands to reason that everything about the newspaper business would be determined by those in it. You wouldn’t go to Kroger to ask how to run a newspaper, right?

But that’s all different on the Web. The Web and all its intricate applications were created by the tech community. Every piece of software solves a problem that the nerds of the world have discovered, and since the only license you need to create things for the Web is one’s own creativity, the growth and development of the Web and its applications has been at light speed.

It’s into this world that traditional media companies have come to do business, but here’s the fundamental problem: we want everything done our way, and that’s not necessarily the way of the Web.

In the early days, the Web consisted of static sites built by static HTML pages. This was the era of the browser, when people “traveled” from point A to point B to “discover” the world that was out there. AOL made it easy by putting a form of “everything” inside its walled garden, but eventually, most people grew tired of the training wheels.

Search basically supplanted browsing, but traditional media companies never adapted. We stayed put, and so began a serious disconnect with reality. Since we liked static sites (they served our needs well, thank you very much), we saw no reason to move on, and when the Live Web came along with its unbundled content and interactive applications, we were trapped in the past. The extent to which this continues today is remarkable, especially since the Web has now moved past search and into the world of subscribe.

So here are a couple of fundamental mistakes that most media companies make in their assumptions:

One, we don’t actually “browse” websites, and we never have. The browser sits on your desktop and brings documents or portions of documents TO YOU. These documents may reside in code form on distant servers, but your browser doesn’t “go” anywhere; it brings everything to you.

This is such an important web fundamental to understand, because it will help you recognize what’s taking place in the unbundled world of the Live Web. Our browser can now bring a little from here and a little from there, all depending on what we want, and this understanding will be critical as the Web moves to its next iteration, the Semantic Web.

Two, the Web is no respecter of sites — all are just points in the maze. Just because you’re a big, bad media company doesn’t mean that you have any special place online. There’s nothing special about your URL that makes you different than any other URL, in the eyes of the Web.

The algorithms that Google uses to rank sites respect the amount of content that is “under” that URL, but they also deeply respect inbound links, because that is viewed as more important than just size. Yahoo may be an enormous “site,” residing on multiple servers, but its URL is just a URL, and the structure of the Web treats it no differently than any other. This is the central factor in Google’s use of the entire Web as its platform. More URLs are better than just one, so Google encourages the growth and development of sites, and monetizes them for builders and owners through its brilliant Adsense program.

The above is part of why I keep encouraging the NAB and other organizations to bring the tech community into its conferences about the future. We’re blinded by our online business models, but the nerds of the world — those people who actually built the Web — aren’t so encumbered, and it’s about time we started listening to them.

A Business Week article caught my attention, because it speaks so well to an ongoing issue that I encounter with media companies. The issue is whether it makes more sense to run digital operations from a centralized unit or to give freedom to individual properties to do their own thing.

Each has its merits, but I’ve always come down more on the side of local control. That’s because I think all of the flexibility for making money exists there and that nobody knows a market like the people who work therein.

The Business Week article looks at new strategic moves by Best Buy that the company believes will better equip it stores to handle the current economic uncertainty. At the crux of the decision is moving control of many things previously dictated by the corporate offices to the hands of the people running the stores. This has had a rather significant impact on business.

Lately, however, the employees at this store (Baytown, Tex) have noticed a different stripe of shopper: Eastern European workers from cargo ships or oil tankers, temporarily docked at Baytown’s busy port, are spending their precious shore hours scouring the store’s aisles. They take a 15-minute cab or shuttle ride to stock up on iPods and Apple laptops priced cheaper than back home. To speed their shopping, the Baytown Best Buy has moved the iPods from the back corner of the store to the front, paired them with overseas power converters, and simplified the signage. Since the changes were made over the holidays, cash register receipts for the boat workers have ballooned by 67%.

This moving around of stock would not have happened in a paradigm of top-down control. As a result, Best Buy’s “centricity” strategy is producing projections of healthy revenue growth at a time when the price of gas is soaring.

This is a fascinating look at a company that is trying to shift control over certain things to the local level, and it’s exactly what media companies need to be doing as well. Any corporate media strategy that forces, for example, a certain kind of niche vertical on all of its properties without regard for their local relevancy is sacrificing localized niche revenue opportunities in the name of uniformity. That kind of thinking may have worked at one time, but today, its value is certainly open to debate.

Let’s give control of how we make money online to the people in the best position to know where the money is and how to go about getting it.

Here is the next in the ongoing series of essays “Local Media in a Postmodern World,” A Reasonable View of Tomorrow.

Media companies continue to reduce expenses in the wake of falling revenues, forcing newsroom restructuring on a fairly regular basis. Where this will end is anybody’s guess, and while some of it must be blamed on the economy, we all know that disruptive technologies and changing consumer behaviors are the biggest factors. I’ve felt for years that a likely future scenario is the rise of independent journalists who sell their output to local and other media outlets, and this essay expands that thinking. It features an interview with Gabe Rivera, creator of Techmeme, a remarkable aggregator of the tech media space. Techmeme is a perfect example of how the niche content of independent journalists could be brought together in one place to form an immediate understanding of what’s important, although the scale isn’t there yet to accomplish it at the local level.

There also doesn’t exist a definitive revenue model for such a scenario. Money. however, doesn’t always flow where we want it to flow, and its flow isn’t very predictable in a time of change. Of more importance, to me, is where is journalism headed, because money has a way of following eyeballs. The tools exist for anybody to be a publisher today, and this is the underlying reality that we cannot escape.

The first volume of this essay series is now available in book form (Reinventing Local Media), and you can find it at Amazon.com.

Read my latest essay.

Then read Scrolling: No Longer a No-No by Poynter’s Fons Tuinstra, where he writes that scrolling is actually the tool of choice for younger users.

Told you so.

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World.

The price at the pump is bumping up to the four dollar range, something I’ve not seen in my lifetime. While paying $50 the other day to fill my little car, it occurred to me that we’d best be prepared to pay these prices through the summer, because regardless of what’s causing the pricing, the law of supply and demand is at work. People drive more come Memorial Day, so the demand drives the price.

In this often frustrating world of supply and demand, the pendulum swings one way or the other as the factors influencing price begin to change. These factors can be seasonal, like the price of gas, or they can be determined by other forms of behavior. In the world of online advertising, it has clearly been a buyer’s market, with advertisers determining rates for revenue-hungry media companies.

All of that is about to change.

The Problem With Web Advertising

The views and suggestions expressed in this essay may seem radical, but like other things I’ve written, they’re designed to make you think. Publishers need to take control of the pricing of their web properties, and I believe it will happen sooner than later.

The first volume of this essay series (Reinventing Local Media) is now available in book form and “in stock” at Amazon.com. Get yours today!

I think this week has been the longest I’ve ever gone without a blog entry. For those who follow what I write, I apologize, but the press of the paying job has made it difficult. First there was the NAB/RTNDA convention in Las Vegas. We had a suite at the Bellagio (the happening hotel) and made presentations to many media companies, introducing them to the web platform software (a.k.a. Content Management System) we’ve created in conjunction with our technology partner, Synapse Multimedia of Shreveport, LA.

Since I played a role in developing the software, it was quite a sense of accomplishment watching as various media company people gave praise. We’ll have a press release coming out on it next week, because it’s a pretty big deal when a major consulting company gets into the product business. We did it, frankly, because it was easier than trying to convince others of the power of our ideas, especially when they had their own software to protect. Cory Bergman of Lost Remote sat in on a presentation and was duly impressed, and when you impress Cory, well that’s really saying something.

The web-based CMS allows just about anyone to drag-and-drop widgets to create their own web pages. It includes ad serving with behavioral targeting, a video player (live and on demand), basic video editing, image editing and user-generated content. One of the big sells of the CMS is its ability to publish content seamlessly across multiple sites — and import RSS feeds from any other site. It also has the ability for a local TV station to run a local ad network of unaffiliated sites.

As a company, we feel strongly that local media companies need control of their own web platform, if they are to reach their full online potential. The era of third-party sites is evolving into one where much more control is at the local level, regardless of who serves up the software.

So three days in Vegas flat wore me out, followed by writing a new essay, which will be published next week. The result has been neglecting my blog, which I promise won’t be the norm.

Speaking of blogs, veteran television newsman and consultant Jim Willi of AR&D has launched a blog, and if the first two entries are any indication, it’s going to be a good one. Jim tells it like it is and will be writing mostly about newsroom strategies and tactics. Mosey on over and have yourself a lookie-loo.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for CBS. First, its local station group reduced expenses by cutting 150+ people, including some very well-paid anchors. Observers expressed astonishment, and overnight, every local news anchor began to squirm just a little bit and discover that those expensive office chairs at the anchor desk aren’t quite as comfy as they used to be.

Then this week came word that the network is continuing talks with CNN to take over some of its newsgathering. Observers gasped again. “What’s the world coming to?” they may have asked. Jeff Jarvis, on the other hand, cut to the chase with the provocative headline, “CBS is leaving the news business.”

We don’t need three evening newscasts exactly alike except as a repository for erectile dysfunction commercials. So let one or two networks win the ratings. Let CBS put more resources into investigations on 60 Minutes. Let CNN cover breaking news — with more help from witnesses with cameras.

Ouch! And now comes word that CBS appears to be giving up on Katie Couric, something that 99% of Americans have seen coming since the day she was first brought into the fold. CBS is denying the CNN and Couric stories, but people view that with the same raised eyebrow that accompanied “I didn’t inhale.”

And so the entire tribe of media observers stands poised to pounce, because CBS seems to be blazing a trail that others will have to follow, and everybody’s got an opinion about that.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia TV columnist Laura Nachman writes of a panel discussion in Philly involving the state of local television news, quoting WCAU-TV news director Chris Blackman.

“In my 26 years in news, I’ve never seen things as dicey as they are now. With layoffs, shrinkage, and downsizing, we need to reinvent ourselves.”

“We are not relevant the way we used to be because viewers don’t need us anymore,” Blackman said referring to mobile devices and the internet.

Blackman proved his point when only a handful of people in the audience of around 150 television professionals raised their hands when he asked if anyone needed to watch local television stations to get their news.

What Mr. Blackman is feeling is the same thing that the CBS observers are feeling, and that is the enormity of the disruptive innovations brought about by technology and a shift away from the modernist, colonial culture that spawned traditional media in the first place. Put a fork in it; it’s done.

Oh, mass media will be with us for a long time yet, but it will never again enjoy the status it once held, and to think otherwise is just nostalgic denial. And I would add that the reinvention process is so pressing that we don’t have time for blame assessment, nor do we have time to do a lot of research. An industry run by bean counters has little chance when entrepreneurship is what’s required, so we need to take a few chances along-the-way.

I’m reminded of the wonderful lament by Henry Adams, “The law of nature is change (chaos), while the dream of man is order.”

Embrace the chaos of change; it’s our best hope for tomorrow.

Here’s the link for Amazon. It says they’re “temporarily out of stock,” but that just means the process hasn’t fully evolved yet. Nevertheless, you can order.

Barnes & Noble doesn’t have it available yet.