the future of news?

I'm not sure I buy what "Robin Good" (a probable pseudonym) is selling, via his Master New Media website. There, I spotted an article The Future of News Is ... which included a prediction about "The Future of Newspapers":

* Smaller in staff, format, influence, attention, profits and margins
* Specific or niche, no longer mass
* Downstream from the Internet
* Inexorably linked to other media
* Explanatory, investigative and narrative

This list strikes me as terribly self-serving; it reminds me of the early 1990's predictions that The Web would (in short order?) bankrupt all the traditional retail outlets (assuming that everyone would lock themselves inside their homes, attach themselves to their PC, never to venture outside and shop alongside other humans, ever again).

While the trend of huge "McMansion" homes continues (each with an opulent home theatre and nearby game room - both eventual dust gatherers), there's something to be said for Getting Out Of The House and interacting with others (if only to be ticked off by their rudeness).

Deep Thought #69: Maybe the idea of The Home Theatre is to rent DVDs from Blockbuster and show them to your friends? But wouldn't it be a LOT cheaper to just take them to dinner-and-a-movie once a month, For Life? Let's see: a Home Theatre adds (say) $40,000 to a house, OR I could wine and dine my friends at a REAL theatre for a couple hundred dollars each time, so .. doing the math ...

I suspect that there will - for a long time - be a market for mass media. Sure, during my lifetime all the formats - radio, television, magazines, newspapers - have become increasingly diversified (witness the availability of the niche Redneck World magazine, linked via my Sundry on Thursday blog). Yes, there are surely better examples of this compartmentalization, but you get the idea. Each of those survives by advertising, and a smaller niche market means that each advertiser must pay more per eyeball and hope their target market actually reads (or even knows about) that target publication. It's an uphill battle, fer sher. I suspect the USA Today; Time Magazine; and National Enquirer's of the world have little to fear.