Marcelo Calbucci

    For the longest time (maybe 10 years or so) people have been proclaiming the death of newspaper and mostly the newspaper industry has just shrugged that idea as if it wouldn't happen any time soon, and so it seemed. But then all started to crash on the last 6 months and like a domino effect, over the next few years a significant percentage of newspapers will be gone (50%? 60%?) and then in another decade 95% of them are gone.

    My prediction is the same thing will happen to Radio and to TV, but it'll take longer.

    Radio is already having revenue issues (so is TV), but the "radio-wave" part is the old way and their structure make it cost ineffective if they have to run 10x cheaper than they are running right now. I'll predict that 50% of radio stations will be gone in 5 years and 95% will be gone in 20 years.

    And TV... exactly same deal.

    The problem has nothing to do with their content and everything to do with the business model and with the delivery mechanism. Newspapers are dirty, radio is limited, and TV doesn't personalize to you.

    In terms of delivery mechanism, all will be replaced by digital transmission on demand through all kinds of networks, including wireless. It's like you can read a newspaper online, you'll be able to listen to radio and to watch TV. That should not be a surprise to anyone, a lot of us already do that, but once it reaches that tipping point where your Aunt Ruth is using it, you know the time has come.

    In terms of business model, the problem is the cost of producing the content (value) by the return it brings. People will still want to read news, listen to talk radio and music, and watch TV shows. So the need for the content is not going away. The problem becomes when the cost to produce an excellent content is $100, but the cost to produce a great content is $10 and the cost to produce good content is $1. At those differences, good for $1 might be enough for some, and great for $10 might be enough for others.

    So, unless the content producers (journalists, movie makers, singers, talk-show hosts) figure out how to cut their cost by 10x, they might be out of a job soon.

    I also wonder a lot about all the students of journalism that are going to hit the market on the next couple of years and all the ones that just graduated. There won't be enough work for them anywhere, even online, because those experienced ones will also be fighting for online audiences.

    The flip side of that (and for me to end at an upbeat note) is that I think people can consume 5 times more content then they are consuming today, it's just that the tools and services are not at their optimum. It's like RSS readers made me able to read 10 times more online content than I could before them. Most people don't even have a clue about RSS yet.