Twitter's on its way out, I'm afraid.
The marketers and PR people have discovered it. The feeds are all filling with irrelevancies. (I've turned it into a feed for my blog; I'm part of the problem.)
Print media - I think is facing two problems. One is the highly atomized nature of the internet. There's a special niche for nearly everybody on the net, so if you only bought Magazine X or Local Paper Y for, say, the Dave Barry column or some restaurant reviewer, you can get that on the web now.
The other is the way mega-corporations have been buying up local papers, essentially making them *less* atomized and more homogenized - reprinting the same stories from a much smaller pool, cutting down on different perspectives and eliminating local coverage in smaller markets entirely. Which is a problem when something happens in a small market (like, say, Palm Beach County) that has national repercussions (like, oh, screwing up the national presidential election).
I don't know that there's a way out of that bind - too general interest for the net, too narrow for major corporate backers. |
