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"Nothing is Forever"

It's hard to read this post from Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis on the demise of the printed form of magazines without considering these warnings from radio's perspective:

If I launched [Entertainment Weekly] today, it wouldn’t be as a magazine. Nor should it be as a collection of critics and features. In my book, I say: “One-size-fits-all won’t work anymore, but a system that helps us help each other find the best entertainment would be valuable. 

If I were to start Entertainment Weekly today, it would be that: a collaborative Google of taste. Today we have ways to make entertainment more of a social experience.” EW should be a system, not a magazine or even a site. 

Print isn’t special. I would feel sad if the brand and franchise died. If they did, it would be because they didn’t update - not today but years ago. Just as newspapers should have seen the impact of the internet coming on more than 13 years ago, so should EW and other magazines, especially a magazine about entertainment in an era of exploding art world and about taste in an era of democratized opinion. 

Nothing is forever.

Indeed, nothing is forever.

The radio industry would be well-served to stop imagining the Internet as a new channel of distribution for existing content and think - hard - about what it means to be a radio station or company in an era when the possibilities for entertainment are magnified many-fold and the rules that have guided radio for generations no longer apply.

If you are still thinking that the role for the Internet in your radio group is as a collection of station websites with streams attached, then you are a fool.

At a recent New York financial conference, many group-heads locked virtual arms, agreeing that now is the time to "get back to the basics."

Dead wrong.

This is about everything but the basics.  

And if you can't get that, then step aside and let someone wiser rule.
December 14, 2008 in Radio's Future |

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