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The primary change will be that customers will control packaging from now on and not producers. Customers want -- and will get, one way or another -- exactly what they want, without added extras tossed in. They want to create their own anthology CDs consisting of exactly the tracks they like; so the business of packing a few good tracks with a lot of dreck onto a CD and selling it for a premium price is probably going to decline. People are getting in the habit of getting data feeds a la carte, so omnibus web sites and big one-stop-shopping media sources are screwed, especially the largest ones (like the NYT) who try to be all things to all people. And all this is true. He misses the point, however, that at least one major form of media has long since adapted to this and undergone the change which is required: the magazines. When I was a kid, the magazine business was dominated by a relatively small number of high-circulation publications like Time, Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. Even into the 1960's you still routinely had publications with monthly circulation into 8 figures, but that's very rare now; TV Guide may well be the only one left, and what it contains is really rather prosaic. Instead, what we have is thousands of smaller magazines which cover much more specific topics. As a result they attract a much more concentrated clientele, which are more desirable to certain advertisers, and therefore can charge a higher ad rate. Finally, there is a sort of reverse economy of scale involved in production of content: smaller is more efficient, producing absolutely less, but more per employee. Fifty organizations with 20 employees each will produce far more than one organization with a thousand employees, and that's what the magazines did. As a result, anyone can find a publication catering to their interests, and often more than one. Keep this in mind. He also points out that centralized news reporting (he uses Dan Rather as his example) is probably doomed; as budgets continue to rise while audiences continue to shrink (through dilution by competition), it simply won't make economic sense any longer. Where he loses it a bit is this: Scheirer acknowledges the critics who contend that as content becomes more directed at the individual, the informaton "commons" could disappear. Dan Rather delivering the key national news of the day becomes all but irrelevant as audiences get the option of receiving only specialized news delivered from, say, a particular political bent, or just refuse to select news with any political content at all. "Guides will accelerate this erosion," Scheirer writes. Not unless the CDA decision is overturned, which seems very unlikely. While hearing a constitutional challenge against the Communications Decency Act, the Third Circuit Court made a very broad analysis of the Internet to decide what model should be used for First Amendment jurisprudence here. The Government tried to contend that it should be managed the way that TV is, where the government has considerable ability to both mandate and to ban content. The plaintiffs, on the other hand, tried to claim that it should be governed as newspapers are, where the government has very little control. The Third Circuit Court disagreed with them both: It decided that the Internet deserved even more protection against government interference than newspapers get. Their conceptual model for web sites was a soapbox in the town square. Within those parameters, the government will have absolutely no right to force any web site to carry anything whatever, and almost no ability to ban material. Basically, the well-known cases: sedition, libel, inducement to riot, violation of copyright, child porn, conspiracy to commit a felony -- could be controlled, but not really a lot else. (And many of those things can only be controlled through civil law.) The real place where I disagree with Scheirer is the pervasive feeling he seems to have that there's some sort of crisis happening. I suppose that's because he aligns mostly with the traditional companies which are about to be badly hurt as their existing business models erode. But this has happened before. As mentioned, the magazines recovered quite nicely from it, but only because they accepted the reality of the situation and rolled with the punch. Large media companies will prosper or die in direct proportion to how rapidly they abandon their obsolescent concepts about distribution and instead embrace new models. There's a fortune to be made by companies which are not paralyzed by nostalgia. But the wor 
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