I'm a fan of the blog, The Baseline Scenario, written by Simon Johnson and a few other economists who try to write in understandable language about the financial crisis. The blog is a good example of how solid thinkers who know how to write and have something to say can draw a substantial following.
I don't know what the blog's traffic is like, but judging by the number of comments left by readers, it's got to be pretty good. Like many other good blogs, it will link you to some great material written by others in publications you would have never thought to look into on your own.
In reading a post tonight about an article written by David Moss in Harvard Magazine, something struck me about the nature of text-based communication.
Those of us in the ad world have been fixated on the decline of print (which I believe is a real decline and not likely to be reversed even during economic recovery). But while concentrating on that issue and its implications, I think we sometimes forget that the decline of print in no way means the decline of text-based communication--especially content-rich, high-density text.
Take the experience I had tonight, first with reading the blog post and then flipping to the Moss article. Both of these are intense verbal communication pieces. The Moss article runs six webpages and, if I were to guess, is a 4,000 word article on a complex subject (the need for managing systemic risk in the banking system). In the pre-Internet era, and even in the pre-Web 2.0 era, my chance of ever encountering this piece was next to zero. Why would I read Harvard Magazine? And unless the piece were reprinted in a publication I did read, it would never cross my radar.
Obviously, any individual reaches a point of overload in terms of how much they can take in when it comes to high-density text. I can spend three hours on Sunday morning reading the New York Times and barely make a dent. Much of the paper goes into the recycling bin.
What this new age we are living in has produced is an environment in which the circulation of ideas has accelerated to an unheard of speed. Yet, our capacity to absorb has not increased. We pile on the sharing tools so we can spread what we like to others, and them to us, and the ideas spread just as fast but, once again, capacity is inelastic. So, we adapt ourselves with various filtering tools. We go to aggregator sites that select content for us. Or we assemble feeds on a Google Reader or something comparable to manage what we take in.
In my Google Reader alignment, I get feeds from no less than a half dozen business publications, several national and two local. The Reader has made a subscription to the local Business Journal completely unnecessary--I get its breaking stories online constantly.
I pay for very little content. Yet, the content keeps flowing. And you know what? There's some amazingly good content out there. It all makes me wonder what is going to happen. I see no reasonable way to monetize the text content that is flooding the market, not do I see much reason to hold onto print subscriptions save for sentimental reasons, like reading the Sunday Times.
Sooner or later, the sentiment is going to run out for these publications. But I'm convinced that the demand for text will never wane. Who's going to pay for it is anybody's guess. Though one thing that is also clear is that the new technologies will drive down the cost of creating and distributing text content in ways we probably haven't fully imagined.
I see a world relatively uncluttered with commercial messages, rich in content, with users at some point coming around and paying small--but significant--dollars to access he content they want.
Comments