Michael Wolff believes that “TV is the new TV.” Jeff Jarvis insists that a paper’s decision to go all-digital is not a death sentence.
Both, in the current economic environment, are fundamentally wrong.
You will find the answer when you turn on your TV. What you will find there is not action, and not news. You will find talking heads. Talking heads are cheap and draw audiences. This was true 50 years ago, when talk radio was first invented, and it is just as true today. TV is not the new TV, it’s the new radio.
A web site budget consists of three kinds of costs:
- Capital costs, the Web site and tools needed to create content on it
- Bandwidth costs, which have been falling over time
- Labor costs, which have been rising over time. These include the management costs needed to define and oversee the site’s mission.
A typewriter and word processing software are one kind of capital cost, but it takes a lot of labor to create things with them. A TV camera and studio set up are another kind of capital cost, but they take much less labor to create things with them.
Anyone with “the gift of the gab,” as Salman Rushdie wrote, can create an hour of TV or radio content in about an hour. But even the best writer (especially the best writer) may take many days to create an hour’s worth of reading material.
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