Thursday, January 20, 2011
App Only News?
The dawn of the internet has shaken the foundation of news-reporting, especially for newspapers. Now the mobile revolution leverages digital distribution in an instant-on always connected experience; the final advantages of paper periodicals are disappearing, forcing news-organizations to push their content into more and more distribution channels. News is still on paper and tv, but it's also on news-sites, blogs, social networks, e-book readers, and app-stores. One publication is betting that app-stores beat the rest. Can a news source survive, or thrive, in only one content channel? Even harder, can that news source justify a pay-wall when ad-supported news of the same events is so prolific? No. The trend of modern ingenuity is to destroy distribution barriers. An attempt to artificially create one is a step in the wrong direction.
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Another blog discussed the accusation against Microsoft of monopolizing the software market. The threat of an app-distributing company monopolizing the news market is equally untenable. As was said before, no player in the software realm can gain the intrinsic power to monopolize everything. Software and computer communication are simply too open to allow that. If some app ends up becoming the primary news distributor of the world, it is only because we the people are willing to tolerate its primacy indefinitely. No matter how popular this app became, it would never be safe from the upcoming new best thing.
ReplyDeleteThat's just how it is in software.