The Vinyl Frontier

Says the former editor of the Financial Times:

“Working in print, pure and simple, is the 21st century equivalent of running a record company specializing in vinyl.”

He adds:

[N]ot only are eyeballs shifting to the Web but consumers are learning how to aggregate their own content -- think RSS or DVRs -- making TV stations, newspapers and the like increasingly irrelevant.

He did say that at the rate ad dollars are migrating to the Web some sites will soon be able to support existing content-creation infrastructures. I’m not convinced. A decade of sharp CPM increases wouldn’t be enough for most newspaper sites to match revenue from their print editions

Tell us something we don't already know. But the vinyl record analogy is more apt than perhaps he thought. There remains today a small, niche market for vinyl records, and some cultishly popular alternative bands (such as Guided By Voices) routinely release special editions of their albums on vinyl. So, too, will there remain a niche market for print newspapers--especially considering the fact that the newspaper industry isn't actively hastening along the shift away from print, as the record industry did with the transition from vinyl to CDs in the 1980s.