The True Strategy Solution

There are two reasons why 2026 could be a momentous year for the Mass Media industries: ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes‘ and Affordability of the Solution.

The profanely naked fact is that those industries are in grave, existential crises. Billions of consumers have ceased using printed periodicals and terrestrial, cable, or satellite broadcasts and switch to using online media. Although the industries were originally skeptical that consumers would ever do so, during the mid-1990s the industries launched an adaptation strategy (which I’ll describe below) whose goal was to compensate for that possibility and lucratively sustain the industries in the 21st Century.

Their adaptation strategy is a blatant catastrophe. The billions of consumer who switched their media consumption habits to online didn’t use the Mass Media industries’ websites anywhere as frequently and thoroughly as they had used the industries printed products and broadcast services. Instead, most consumers routinely use the online services of new enterprises that weren’t initially founded to be media companies but from whom those billions discovered that they could receive individuated feeds of news, entertainment, and other information, that better satisfied each individual’s unique mix of informational needs, interests, and tastes than any Mass Media company’s website (or practical combination thereof) could do. The overall result of using that faulty strategy for 30 years are that the Mass Media industries have lost 60 to 75 percent percent of their consumers, their advertisers, and their annual gross revenues.

Those huge failures flummoxed the Mass Media industries. My March 19th newsletter mentioned that Nielsen data proved ten years after this strategy was launched that it had failed. Yet the Mass Media industries’ executives have obtusely continued it for a further 20 years, despite now decades of empirical evidence (as well as red ink) reinforcing the proof if its failure. Like an orchestra of zombies mindlessly playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ while their titanically misguided industries sink, these media executives ‘manage decline’ as if it is normality and that they have no other choice or ideas what else to do. The situation raises grave questions about their acumen and intelligence. Intelligent businesspeople in other industries would have declared the strategy’s naked failures long ago and switched to better. Not the zombies hidebound in Mass Media corporate suites.

My second reason is that this year the technologies, costs, and ease-of-use of what I know to be the correct and true strategy have become available, affordable, and readily usable. Will the venerable but sclerotic Mass Media Industries grasp these and their capabilities as life rafts that carry them back to sustainability? Or will they overlook these and ultimately be sunk? Let it be the former, because I’m shifting the focus of my consulting from the identifying problems to implementing the solution.

So, let me solve the problem for you all. I will need to:

  1. explain the Mass Media industries failed strategy;
  2. articulate why three commonly proposed alternative strategies are illusory;
  3. state four tenets that any true solution must be based upon;
  4. what content creators, consumers, and advertisers require from the true strategy;
  5. encapsulate the true solution;
  6. describe how any media company can now afford to implement and operate this strategy (I’ll use the example of a small daily newspaper);
  7. outline editor’s new role;
  8. explain what media academicians must do to catch up to the epochal changes underway; and,
  9. explain why the search engines and social media companies that nowadays dominate audiences and advertising spending online will likely do so only another 6 to 12 years.

All that said, there is no practical way I can fit into this single newsletter edition all of what’s necessary to understand the new adaptation strategy and why it is logically so. Thus, what you’re now reading will contain #1, 2, and 3. On Monday, I’ll send a second newsletter containing #4 and 5. One week from today, I’ll send #6. And a week from this coming Monday, a newsletter with #7, 8, and 9. I’ve already written all four..

Let’s now move toward the solution…

The Mass Media Industries’ Myopically Misguide Online Strategy

I’ve unequivocally stated in previous newsletters that nearly 20 years of empirical data and declining financial statements unambiguously prove that the myopically misguided strategy which during the mid-1990s the Mass Media industries implemented in their attempt to adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment has been disastrous.

Nearly 20 years ago when I began teaching New Media Management in graduate school (which coincidentally was also the year when Nielsen//Netratings data began showing the strategy was misguided), I began calling this strategy what it clearly was: the ‘Shovelware Strategy.’ It simplistically assumes that:

  • websites and webpages are online equivalents of printed editions and printed pages, or the online equivalent of radio or television broadcast channels;
  • consumers and advertisers will use these websites the same ways (i.e., as often and thoroughly) as they had with print or broadcast;
  • the past century’s business models for print or broadcast would operate the same on these websites as those models had in print and broadcast;
  • and the Mass Media industries would thus earn the same revenues from online as they had from print and broadcast. In fact, most or all consumers shifted to online, then the Mass Media publishers could eliminate their expenses of purchasing, printing, and paper products and Mass Media broadcasters could avoid the regulator hassles and expenses of operating transmitters on public airways. This could make online media even more profitable that printed or broadcast media had been.

So, the industries simply shoveled their Mass Media theories, doctrines, business models, products, services, and practices of the waning Industrial Era into the personal computer-mediated technologies of the dawning Informational Era, and hoped everything would work.

It is a catastrophe. Examine the experience of the U.S. newspaper industry, the Mass Media industrial sector that has longest used to the Shovelware Strategy. During the past 20 years, as most Americans shifted their media consumption to online, this industry lost three-quarters of its readership, advertising clientele, and annual revenues. In 2006, its gross annual revenues were $55.70 billion, but will be $20.3 billion this year. And if you adjust those figures for 20 years of inflation, the real annual revenue loss plunged from $85 billion to $20.3 billion (-76%). Within that $20.3 billion are what revenues use of the Shovelware Strategy did generate: $8 .6 billion annually (of which more than $1 billion is by The New York Times alone) after 20 year of its use. Will the Shovelware Strategy’s revenue grow ever save the U.S. newspaper industry? Unfortunately, no. It might ultimately save The New York Times, but the Shovelware Strategy’s annualized growth rate these past 20 years has been a mere 0.3% for the U.S. newspaper industry which have been declining at an annualized rate -1.3% during the same period.

Any media executive who claims that the Mass Media industries long-term usage of the Shovelware Strategy is succeeding has his head stuck in the sand and needs to have his delusional ass kicked out of the industries. Continued use of this calamitous strategy calls into question their intelligence and acumen. Savvy businesspeople would long ago have admitted its glaring failure, found a better alternative, and be leading the Mass Media industries into sustainability and lucrative success. Instead, apparently braindead zombies who stagger about plush corporate suites are mindlessly undertaking these industries’ grave decline.

Why are their awareness and thinking so dead? My more than 30 years f experiences dealing Mass Media executives has led me to believe the reason they persist using this blatantly failed strategy is cognitive blinkering. They not only ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’, but most of them latently assume (despite huge evidence to the contrary) that the Industrial Era’s theories, doctrines, and practices of media—all of which they’ve shoveled into online—are the ultimate evolution of media, the ne plus ultra, and that there is no better path, so if the Shovelware Strategy has failed, there is nothing they can do, no alternative. So, they manage the decline.

So then, what do I propose they do instead ?

First, Avoid 3 Frequently Proposed Strategies That Are Mirages

Three alternative strategies are frequently proposed (mainly by journalism pundits or professors who lack first-hand experience or academic credentials in Media Management). Unfortunately, all three are equally simplistic spinoffs of the Shovelware Strategy; avoid the fundamental reasons why that strategy has failed; and thus can quickly be quashed and discarded:

The Philanthropic Reliance Strategy. Some people have proposed that billionaires, centimillionaires, or not-for-profit organizations should purchase and underwrite dying Mass Media companies. This strategy isn’t a cure; it’s a crutch. It is akin to connecting dying patients to Life Support systems. There are more than 900 daily and 4,300 weekly newspapers, 10,000 radio stations, 1,300 television stations, and scores of television networks in the U.S. (nonetheless the numbers worldwide). Are there enough willing philanthropists to underwrite all? Consider the exhaustion of those who have. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who was once a newsboy for The Washington Post, is now one of the five richest people in the world, and who in 2013 purchased that newspaper company, recently cut a third of its staff because he has grown tired of underwriting its accrued losses which now total more than double the quarter-billion dollars he paid for the newspapers. Likewise, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the bio-tech billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times since 2018, is attempting to raise outside funding to keep it operating. Philanthropy only comes from a few and only goes so far.

The ‘What Works’ Strategy. Some people have proposed the solution to be finding and emulating the few Mass Media companies that have had some success using the Shovelware Strategy. This superficially might appear to be logical. However, its proponents apparently aren’t aware of Survivorship Bias. The laws of statistics predict that there likely will be identifiable examples of ‘what works’ even in the case of a failed strategy, but that those outliers aren’t applicably relevant. (Mathematician Abraham Wald’s counter-intuitive analysis of where to armor combat aircraft during World War II is a stunning example of why avoiding the Survivorship Bias is vital to finding the real solution.) A true solution will work for most, if not all, cases rather than just the outliers that survive. The outliers in this case are the developed nations’ national newspapers and some entrepreneurial websites run by small teams who work in unusually prosperous town or suburbs, etc. What these outliers have done has already not worked during the past 20 years in more than 95 percent of American communities. So, why then would someone think that their business models will now work? Don’t be seduced by Survivorship Bias.

The Entrepreneurship Strategy. Some people have proposed that journalists and other media workers who become unemployed, as well as people who want to enter the media industries, shouldn’t rely upon employment by media companies but instead learn entrepreneurship and work for themselves or even start their own media companies. As a postgraduate business professor since 2007, I have nothing against entrepreneurship. Ever since Johannes Gutenberg, most Mass Media companies were founded by entrepreneurs (including the daily newspaper my great-great grandfather founded in 1877). However, anyone who teaches entrepreneurship without first clearly knowing the ultimate reasons why teams of individuals (such as journalists or other media workers) are becoming unemployed, is engaged in malpractice. (In fact, I’ve found it notable that many media entrepreneurship courses are being taught by instructors who have never run a media business nor ever long been viably self-employed it.

Four Towering Tenets Anyone Formulating The Strategy Must Accept

When I stated that most Mass Media executives ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ and seem cognitively blinkered, I didn’t mean only about the results of their Shovelware Strategy. They also need to perceive and acknowledge four landmarks clearly visible in the panorama of changes underway in the media environment. Only then can they be able to lead their industries towards sustainability and success online.

  • A Truly Epochal Change. The single greatest problem that I’ve found during my 30 years of consulting to Mass Media executives is that most myopically misperceive now as merely a more ‘digital’ version of the decade in the past when they started their careers (hence their belief that the mid-1990s ‘Shovelware Strategy’ might still work). Perhaps that is human nature. Change, when it occurred at all, happened slowly during in the past 10,000 years. Not anymore. Most educated people now know about the technological observation known as Moore’s Law. Coined in 1964, it has shown that for more than 125 years the power of computational technologies have doubled and their costs halved ever two years. Although the initial jumps of that exponential acceleration weren’t that much (2 to 4-times as powerful, then to 8-times, etc.), the jumps now underway decades later (536,870,912 to 1,073,741,824-times, then to 2,147,483,648, etc.) are astronomical. Quantum physics, the Internet, and the device on which your reading these words are results of that. Totally automated factories, self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence, humanoid robotics, etc., are slightly more recent and advanced examples of it, too. Children born this year will see more change during their lifetimes than have all previous human generations combined! An epochal change from the Industrial to the Informational eras began some 60 years ago. Like the change from the Agricultural to the Industrial eras, it might be turbulent. Old jobs will be lost; entirely new categories of jobs created. Almost all industries, institutions, professions, and trades will be disrupted. Some demolished. Anyone searching for a successful media business model in the 21st Century media needs to perceive and accept the sheer scope of the changes underway. Stop trying to manipulate the new technologies emulate the old. Instead, objectively assess the technologies for their new and unprecedented capabilities (i.e., not just whether those can ‘digitally’ imitate printed paper or broadcast antennae) and let these be your guides to media business career success.
  • Scarcity to Surplus. Historians frequently cite Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type printing press as the most influential event of the second millennium. By magnitudes, it expanded the reach of knowledge in Europe and correspondingly reduced the cost of that knowledge, ending that continent’s ‘Dark Ages’. It sparked the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Enlightenment. However, only the aristocracy and rich could afford access to the printed products of Gutenberg’s invention. By comparison, the explosive rise of personal computer-mediated technologies during the past 35 years has given nearly instant access to virtually all the world’s information to more than six billion people (74% of humanity), the number of people who have Internet access via personal computers or smartphones. That is the greatest change in the history of media. What was once a relative scarcity of news, entertainment, and other information, has switched to a surplus, even overload. We live in a new era of persistent content surplus. And economists or sociologists will tell you, any shift in supply from scarcity to surplus greatly changes the economic values and the power dynamics in the marketplace. What consumers are nowadays willing to pay (i.e., the values they now place on various types of contents) has been reduced by the magnitudes of their increase in supply. Power in the informational marketplace has likewise greatly shifted from the content creators toward the consumers. Most of the traditional Mass Media ‘gatekeepers’ and many other intermediaries have been eliminated. If you don’t understand and accept these factual realities, you’ll be unable to function and thrive in 21st Century media.
  • The Unbundling. In his best-selling 1977 book Webonomics, business journalist Evan Schwartz was the first to note that the traditional packages of Mass Media contents (the editions of newspapers and magazines, the programs scheduled in broadcasts, the songs on a compact disc, etc.) deconstruct and unbundle once placed online. “They lose their unity. They break up and decompose into their constituent elements. No longer is the editorial package tightly controlled by a team of editors… The editors must relinquish some of that control to the readers, who play a big part in reinventing and reinterpreting how that information is seen.” That unbundling nowadays should be obvious. It’s a characteristic of computer-mediated technologies; a permanent change that further advances of technologies won’t reverse. During the relative scarcity of information during Industrial Era, how the Mass Media industries traditionally packaged news, entertainment, and other information, had holistic value: that bundled package was worth more than the aggregated totals of the elements it contained. However, the unbundling and the shift from scarcity to pervasive surplus of the Informational Era has created the opposite dynamic—anti-holistic value. The total value of the packaged elements is worth more when sold apart than when packaged. (For a good primer about this, read the 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, by former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine Chris Anderson.) That makes the Mass Media industries continued attempts to market and charge subscription prices for their traditional packages of contents an increasingly dysfunctional and obsolete endeavor. Indeed, to comprehend this extraordinary change, consider the examples in the next bullet point.
  • The Phenomenal Popular and Financial Success of Individuation. If anyone wants to examine what works online, what truly has been successful, behold the spectacular popular and commercial successes of Search Engine and Social Media sites (plus audio or video services such as Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, etc.). Dwell on the examples of Google and Facebook, which are among the fastest growing companies of any type in world history and are now the biggest media companies in the world, with 4 billion and 3 billion respective users. In aggregate, thosee two companies now dominate 50% of the world’s online advertising, which is now the world’s largest form of advertising. Neither of these companies were originally founded to be media companies. So, how did these two companies, plus similar ones, come to dominate the world’s media? Because billions of consumers discovered that by using these companies’ personal computer-mediated services, each individual consumer could receive an individuated feeds of news, entertainment, and other information, that better matches that individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than they can receive from the products or services of any Mass Media company (or practical combination thereof). For instance, compare Facebook service to that of the world’s largest traditional Mass Media company, China Central TeleVision (CCTV), which says it has 900 million viewers. If all of those viewers simultaneously tune-in to CCTV’s Channel One, they all see an identical program. Yet if Facebook’s 3 billion users all logon simultaneously , each sees an entirely unique mix of items compared to every other user. The term I’ve used in my classroom when describing this is Individuated Media rather than Mass Media. Although the companies of the Mass Media industries have mass production and mass reach (i.e., which is how they became colloquially known as the ‘Mass Media’), these companies of the Individuated Media industries have mass production, mass reach, plus simultaneously mass customization. This is why I consider them to be an entirely new genus of media. Mass Media executives who don’t acknowledge the obvious fact that billions of consumers have abandoned routine usage of their products and services (no matter if in print, broadcast, or online), and likewise acknowledge that those consumers have shifted to routinely using the services of Individuated Media companies, are delusional. Those billions of consumers have done so because Individuated Media allows them to receive a mix of news, entertainment, and other information, that is more relevant to each of those individual’s own unique needs, interests, and tastes, than any product or service from a Mass Media company (or practical combinations thereof) can provide. And as Moore’s Law and its corollaries continues to advance exponentially the power of computer-mediated technologies (particularly the rise of Artificial Intelligence or perhaps Quantum Computing), this competitive advantage of Individuated Media will not only become ever more articulate and powerful, but so will the huge gap in success between them and any Mass Media industries that use the ‘Shovelware Strategy’. The Mass Media industries need to stop that from becoming their epitaph.

These four tenets are observable, proven facts in the new media environment. Any attempt to formulate an online strategy counter to these will fail.

The correct strategy for the Mass Media industries must integrally solve seven requirements content creators, consumers, and advertisers have. These are the building blocks for the correct strategy:

The Individuated Media newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1. A PRACTICAL MEANS FOR CONTENTS CREATORS TO TRACK THEIR CONTENTS’ USAGE AND CHARGE ITS USERS. The Internet wasn’t originally designed for such purposes. However, that internetwork’s birth from military-sponsored university research provides the lineage to a solution. For the past 28 years, academicians, scientists, and researchers have been using the Document Object Identifier (DOI) system to track the online origin and usages of academic papers, research, data sets, and other forms of information. An assigned DOI number is a persistent identifier or persistent handle, part of an online object’s metadata. It remains bound and remains fixed over the lifetime of that object. Approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a DOI fits within the Internet’s existing Uniform Resource Identifier system (an example of an URI is any website’s Uniform Resource Locator or URL). The DOI system last year processed more than 390 million objects of content and is administered by the not-for-profit DOI Foundation. The Mass Media industries should license DOI and establish an even more robust version to provide tracking of their contents’ usage throughout the Internet. DOI system’s ISO approval means it will likely be fully compliant with future Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. (For how to charge users or intermediaries, see #4 below.)

2. A PRACTICAL MEANS FOR CONTENT CREATORS TO IDENTITY, TARGET, AND DELIVER CONTENTS TO EACH AND ANY CONSUMER WHOM IT TRULY INTERESTS. During the past two decades, that has been attempted through the rudimentary means of manually including keywords in items’ metadata. A major flaw in that is inserted keywords rely upon the content creator’s chosen human language. To be internationally usable, the best solution should be independent of human languages and automatically analyze and encode the item (while allowing for human oversight). All produced media contents should thus be machine-readable: the content creator’s machine analyzes and encodes it with appropriate metadata from a universal schema. Any consumer’s machine programmed by or for that individual with his expressed or recorded interests uses its online agents (almost certainly AI) to seek sources of what news, entertainment, and other information that individual wants. Intermediaries using similar technology might be involved. The appropriate mix of such information is then sent to that consumer, tracked by the DOI system explained in #1 above.

As Moore’s Law, its corollaries, and their interactions continue exponentially advancing computer-mediated technologies used, this process will continually increase its articulation and reduce its required costs (see the example in the third of these newsletters about how a small media company could implement the solution today). This is a trend that cannot be reversed. Its usage via by Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI) has already begun.

Which universal content coding schema should the Mass Media industries adopt? The ideal answer is Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT or simply ‘Dublin Core’), the most comprehensive form of machine-readable eXtensible Markup Language (XML). This Open Standard and ISO certified schema is fully compliant with the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force. A small number of media organizations nowadays use specialized (i.e.,, approved by the International Press Telecommunications Council) subsets of XML for their metadata (subsets such as NewsML, SportsML, RightsML, etc.). Some others use what they call “ninjs” (‘News in JSON’, a version of JavaScript Object Notation). All are subsets of Dublin Core. However, if the ultimate solution is to be universal, compatible with future technological systems and perhaps future new forms of content, then the best approach is to use the master set from the start.

3. A MULTIMEDIA, MULTINATIONAL, MULTILINGUAL, AND MULTICURRENCY INTERCHANGE SYSTEM ACCOMPLISHING THOSE REQUIREMENTS. Although most media contents produced are consumed locally, it is a fact that globalization and the Internet have also caused rising international consumption. For examples, the website of the Guardian in the United Kingdom routinely ranks among the Top Ten newspaper websites consumed by Americans. Almost one-fifth of The New York Times’s website users are from outside the U.S. Forty percent of CNN.com users are. Those and other globalized sites also provide their contents in multiple languages. Moreover, most users will use websites from newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, bloggers, etc. So, any true solution will have to operate for all of those sources of contents. In addition, if sites would like to charge anything for access, this means such a solution must deal with multiple currencies and other forms of payment (such as PayPay, AliPay, PagoEfectivo, Venmo, UPI Lite, BitCoin, etc.)

Given human nature, creating agreement among common standards and system by all sectors of media in all nations will likely be the most difficult task to accomplish in any true solution. I remember the mid-1990s when I was one of two outside consultants to the New Century Network consortium of eight major U.S. newspaper publishing companies, which were trying to formulate their initial strategy for utilizing the Internet. The staff and we outside consultants proposed that those newspapers companies create a shared online advertising system, a shared database through which all their consumers could find stories, etc. The companies, which during decades had grown used to competing against one another, reject all such cooperative efforts. Hidebound, they’d become myopic to the advantages of common defenses in a ‘converged’ online world. Within 60 months, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, CraigsList, Monster.com, and other startup companies were founded, perceived their weaknesses and eviscerated those eight major U.S. newspaper companies. Moreover, any true solution now will be even more difficult simply because it will require cooperation among, not just within, Mass Media sectors and in internationally.

4. A PRACTICAL MICROTRANSACTION AGGREGATIN SYSTEM. Mass Media companies’ chief financial officers (CFOs) love charging consumers a fixed monthly sum (ranging from $5 to $20) to access to their company’s website. It makes financial planning easier and helps equity market analysts predict the company’s revenues in the next and subsequent annual quarters. Like the eventual demise of an old warhorse, this increasingly antiquated concept will be missed by those CFOs. Yet it will die for three reasons.

● It’s readily apparent in the market: ‘subscription fatigue.’ Consumers demonstrably aren’t willing to pay many or most websites such fees. Research by StartUs Insights, Deloitte, and others indicates that that the average American online consumer visit between 50 and 100 websites per month yet isn’t willing to pay subscription fees to more than 4 to 6 (including the fee that consumer pays for company for Internet access). Consumers’ unwillingness to pay fees to more than those numbers of websites means that mainly the major content company in each media sector (Netflix, NYTimes.com, etc.) get subscribers but not the remaining companies which comprise the majority of that sector. Is that situations what’s best for the sustainability of the Mass Media industries?

● Given that the Mass Media industries’ traditional packages of contents (i.e., a newspaper or magazine edition, a broadcast program schedule, an album of songs, etc.) unbundles and deconstructs once placed online, why would most consumers—particularly when Mass Media websites’ own weblogs demonstrably show consumers use only some of the unbundled parts (i.e., a story, a video clip, a song, etc.), be forever motivated to pay a fix monthly fee for access to the entire package? In a world in which unsolicited marketing postal mails (i.e., ‘junk mail’) receive a 2 to 3 percent response rate, are the Mass Media industries’ websites that convert into subscribers only 3 to 5 percent of their websites’ users doing really that much better than junk mail’s results? I think the current situation is demonstrably unsustainable.

● As the title itself of Chris Anderson’s best-selling 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, should teach the Mass Media industries a vital lesson about how thoroughly the introduction of computer-mediated technologies has shifted scarcity to surplus. Prior to those technologies, mass marketers of goods were limited by their stores’ physical shelf space limitations. That meant they vended only commonly purchased items, not having space to sell other items. Likewise, the Mass Media industries had faced the limits of page space in each printed edition or else the broadcast time limit of there being only 24 hours in each day. That meant their printed editions and broadcast programming consisted mainly of the the items of greatest common interests, not all interests. What changed was that startup companies (consider Amazon and Alibaba) perceived how computer-mediated technologies can invert that situation. After all, there are virtually no spatial limitations online. Rather than focus their efforts upon selling commonly purchased items, they became phenomenally popular and financially successful selling the huge numbers of items that hadn’t been commonly sold. Amazon and Alibaba realized that there is greater aggregated revenue from selling less common items to more people than selling more common items to only those interested in the common. We all have a few common interests, but more (if not most) of us each have tens or hundreds more less common interests, the unique mix of which makes us each individual. This is a lesson that the Mass Media industries, whose traditional products and services are based upon serving the most common interest, need to learn in this new era.

Those three reasons strongly suggest that the Mass Media industries stop charging $5 to $20 monthly fees from the tiny percentages of their website visitors who might be willing to pay such and instead charge much smaller amounts or even microtransactions from the greater percentage of visitors willing to pay less. Would reducing the fees charged by a factor of ten linearly result in 30 to 50 percent of visitors agreeing to pay that? Or would the resulting percentages of subscribers be greater than that?

Unfortunately, no microtransaction vendor’s current proprietary system has been embraced by all sectors of the Mass Media industries, and particularly not internationally. Most were developed for a particular sector, operate using only a limited number of languages, or can’t process all means of payment. So, I say, why re-invent the wheel? I think a solution is to use the current worldwide system for processing credit and debit card transactions (i,e., Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express, etc.) The temporary flaw here is that this current system charges the creditor 0.5% to 3.5% of the transacted amount plus a fixed fee of $0.05 to $0.30. This the systems incapable of processing microtransactons of less than $0.05 unless the creditor wants a loss. However, I think this can be sidestepped if the transaction processor or an intermediary can aggregate the microtransactions and process those as a monthly total rather than each transactions in real time. Internet Service Providers or telephone company might be amenable to doing so if they receive a commission. (Indeed, telephone companies have had more than a century of experience processing small transaction amounts.)

5. A PRACTICAL SHIFT IN TRANSACTIONAL CONTROL, PLUS ADVANCED PRIVACY, FOR THE CONSUMERS. Mass Media industries, as well as the Individuated Media companies (search engines, social media websites, etc.), are used to ‘owning’ their consumers. Yet the epochal shift in information from scarcity to surplus has markedly changed the power dynamics in the media environment. Power has greatly shifted from content creators towards consumers, a trend that will continue for three reasons. First, Mass Media industries are discovering that their traditional ‘gatekeeper’ and ‘agenda setting’ roles are no longer as viable, and that their traditional packaging of contents unbundles and deconstructs once shoveled online. Second, governments are becoming increasingly aware of how the Individuated Media companies’ content selection algorithms are intentionally formulated for addition. Third, as Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI) begins to permeate the media environment worldwide, it will do so on the side the consumer because AAI systems vendors realize that the largest target market for services is consumers and not content providers. Mass Media marketers who currently ‘own’ consumers and profit from the sales or manipulation of data about consumers will increasingly find ever greater computational forces counteracting them.

6. ADVERTISING WILL BECOME NOT ADJACENT, INTERSTITIAL, OR INTRUSIVE, BUT SIMPLY A CO-EQUAL FORM CONTENTS. Traditional Mass Media marketers might be alarmed by how much the epochal change from scarcity to surplus in information has shifted the transactional power balance in the media environment. They need to adapt to that fact. During the previous era, consumers had little choice but to see printed advertisements adjacent to the stories they read in newspapers and magazines or to forebear advertisements interrupting the radio or television or cinematic content they consumed. Moreover, neither they nor the marketers were satisfied by the old power balance. During the 19th Century, marketer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!” The fact that many online consumers are willing to pay extra fees to receive ‘ad free’ contents clearly indicate their dissatisfaction of intrusive, interstitial, or even adjacent advertising.

How much could the power balance between intrusive advertising and consumer preference change now that the power has shifted so much? Enough so that online marketing guru Seth Godin proposed a ‘Permission Marketing’ solution, in which marketers would directly pay consumers to receive ads. If the cost of those payments is less than the costs marketers currently pay intermediaries such media companies, that could work.

However, advertising is more likely, or in addition to, become simply another form of content, co-equal with news, entertainment, and other information. It would be to delivered via the same systems to consumers. The consumers select the types, categories, and topics of products and services which they want to purchase now, in the future, or when a price they are willing to pay is accepted, and such information is sent to them, paid for by the marketers. A consumer’s AAI could also formulate and predict a consumer’s unexpected needs, interests, and tastes, based upon past queries, purchases, lifestyle, and types of information used by that consumer.

I realize that such proposals might not please marketers who want their advertisements to be seen by all consumers “in case those consumers become interested.” However, surveys indicate that consumers are much more displeased seeing the sheer numbers of advertisements for which they’re not interested than they are by missing advertisements about products or services they hadn’t realized would interest them.

7. THE NEED FOR ALL THAT TO BE DONE WITH ‘OPEN SOURCE’ TECHNOLOGIES. Two apt aphorisms are ‘There is no limit to what can be accomplished provided that no one take credit’ and ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’ I’ve all too often seen proposed solutions to problems shatter for no reason other than someone holds too proprietary an interest in the solution. Would more than six billion people (73 percent of humanity) currently be using websites if the World Wide Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee had required that anyone using it to pay him a license fee? Likewise the Internet itself? Using Open Source technologies eliminates the competitions among proprietary vendors delaying any agreement upon implementations. Moreover, vendors themselves find that building system using Open Source technologies tends to make other vendors who want to build atop, further, or otherwise fitting versions of what was built. Open Source best ensures that something will be most widely accepted and used. Open Source’s successes indeed are the reason you’re reading this on the Open Source Internet.

Based upon clearly observable empirical evidence from the first quarter of the 21st Century, we can reasonably conclude that the Mass Media industries, whose products and services arose from the Industrial Era’s analog production technologies, are demonstrably evaporating. Those legacy industries need to accept that the epochal informational shift from relative scarcity to surplus caused by the introduction of personal-computer mediated technologies into the media environment has caused their traditional products and services (no matter if in print, broadcast, or online), packaged to satisfy a demographic or topical group rather than each individual, not only unbundles and deconstructs when placed online and has thus become unpopular, obsolete, as has their traditional business models.

It has become blatantly clear during the first quarter of the 21st Century that what has already superseded those failing products and services and instead has become billions of people’s predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information, are the online services of relatively new companies which perceptively realized the hallmark advantage of computer-mediated technologies isn’t online replication of legacy media’s demographically-targeted products and services but the aggregation, mass customization (and even bespoke individuation), then online delivery of whatever mix of news, entertainment, and other information that best matches each individual consumer’s unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes. In other words, not just mass production and mass reach but mass individuation. That’s why billions of consumers during the past 20 years have abandoned the Mass Media’s product and services and instead shifted to using the services of new companies that offer such individuation. These novel companies (the search engines, social media, genre-specifics such as Spotify, Pandora, etc.) have become among the fastest growing in world history; are now used daily by dearly 6 billion people; and already reap more than half the world’s online advertising (nowadays the world’s largest sector of advertising).

Executives of the Mass Media industries must accepted the obvious factual reality that Individuation of contents has become the major media trend of the 21st century. Fortunately, the technologies needed for the Mass Media industries to begin offering individuated services not only not readily exist but now have become affordable costs and increasingly easy to use. All media industries must implement these and adapt. Especially when you consider that the exponentially accelerating advancements in computer-mediated technologies (particularly Artificial Intelligence) during this century will only exponentially increase the success gap between media companies using such technologies and those that don’t.

The scene could be Michelham Priory in England, Aulne Abbey or Groenendaal Priory in Belgium, or Maulbronn Monastery in Germany. Within scriptoria, within their monasteries surrounded by moats, medieval monks painstakingly labored copying books by hand. Although almost all the books they copied were Christian Bibles, the senior monks among them would also be allowed to copy unsanctified works by the ancient Romans and Greeks. They were highly trained holy men whose main purpose in life was to copy and disseminate ‘The Word of God’. A monk trained in the scriptoria could copy a book by hand in six months to two years, depending upon if it was ‘illuminated’ with ecclesiastical illustrations or not. Meanwhile, the moats surrounding their monasteries meanwhile protected them against invaders, criminals, and other secular forms of attack.

The metallurgist Johannes Gutenberg’s 1454 invention of the moveable-type printing press threw them into crises. His technology, the world’s first mass production machine, could produce 100 Bibles per month, albeit each not as magnificently illustrated as the monks’ work. Not only was Gutenberg profane — an unsanctified man untrained in holy works, unlike the monks, but he and his device was enormously outproducing the monks. Within a year, his press could produce more Bibles than could all the scriptoria monks in Europe put together, with far lower production costs, vastly lowering the retail prices of Bibles, and ‘stealing’ all but the richest clients of the monks’ work. For a century thereafter, the monks unsuccessfully tried to compete with presses, but the new technology was too efficient, too practical, and too popular.

There are so many similarities between those monks’ predicament and those of Mass Media workers worldwide who are nowadays trying to compete with Google, Baidu, Facebook, Vkontakte, Sina Weibo, X, and other companies started during the past 20 years and that are using computer-mediated technologies to provide billions of consumers with individualized feeds of news, entertainment, and other information, that match each’s own individual mix of needs, interests, and tastes than can any traditional Mass Media company’s products or services.

How can Mass Media companies compete with these new and more efficient, practical, and popular technologies? The new companies that offer these new technologies operate enormous computer data centers to provide such services. How can most Mass Media companies compete with that? They can, now, easily,and affordably.

Let’s use as an example a small daily newspaper (print circulation: 10,000 to 5,000) . It could be the Willimantic Chronicle in the United States, Tsubetsu Shimpō in Japan, or Kerala Janatha in India. The following six steps into individuation should work for most Mass Media companies.

1. Light a Spark

Get past this next sentence: All you need is a supercomputer. Most people have trouble visualizing the amazing effects of ‘Moore’s Law’, an observation about the exponential progress of computing technologies. Pictured above is a great example: a photograph of laptop computer next to a supercomputer. The small, speckled box is the NVIDIA DGX Spark Artificial Intelligence desktop supercomputer, available from Amazon for $4,700 (that’s $4,700; not $4.7 million). All a small Mass Media company needs to individuate the contents it publishes or broadcast is one of these (or similarly-price competing supercomputers such as the Asus Ascent GX10, or MSI EdgeXpert).

All these tiny boxes contain NVIDIA’s Blackwell supercomputer processor, the equivalent of IBM’s $33 million Roadrunner supercomputer, which was the world’s most powerful mainframe computer in 2008. Roadrunner consisted of 296 racks of computer processing units consuming 2.5 megawatts of electricity per hour, weighing 500,000 lbs. (22,700 kg); and taking up 6,000 square feet (56 sq. m) of floor space. By comparison, the Spark weighs 2 pounds (1 kg), is the size of a hardcover book, and uses 240 watts of electricity per hour (equivalent to two 1990s home light bulbs). There have been few better examples of how Moore’s Law has both miniaturized and made computing affordable than this tiny device.

The Spark’s 1-petaflop (‘peta’ as in 1,000 trillion processes per second) and 128 gigabytes of random access memory (RAM) can simultaneously process up to 200 billion (yes, ‘b’ as in billion) local parameters, which is computerese meaning that if there are ten million people living in your market area, the Spark can process up 200,000 items of profile information about each individual.

Any newspaper with a printing press during the 20th Century needed at least one technician called a pressman to operate that device. During the 21st Century, your media company will need at least one technology to program its equipment, if only for the initial setup. If you’ve some experience with the Ubuntu operating system, you can do it yourself. Otherwise, hire an outsider to install (probably technician fee $700 to $1,000) the following free software applications.

The Spark comes preloaded with software that gives it the capabilities to see and understand computerized images (scanned photos, videos, diagrams, etc.) and to operate via voice control as well as by keyboard. Visit a website such as Github.com where you or the technician can download for free into the Spark a Small Language Model (SLM) software program (such as Mistral 7B or Llama-3-8B). Once those are installed, you’re in business.

2. Don’t Forget the Past

The first thing to do is to upload your newspaper’s entire archive into the Spark. If you’ve already digitized the archive, excellent! But if the archive is instead on microfiche, you’ll ironically need to spend more money than your entire supercomputer! Microfiche is an obsolete 120-year-old technology which was never designed for digitization. You’ll need to purchase a dedicated microfiche scanner (such as the ST ViewScan 4, $6,500 to $8,000 new or typically $4,800 to $5,000 used). However, if the newspaper’s archive exists only in the most primitive form, namely printed stories glued onto typewriter pages, just load all of those sheets of paper into an inexpensive but robust scanner (such as $550 Epson FastPhoto FF-680W which can automatically scan 60 pages per minute). The SLM software in the Spark will read, analyze, and catalog each story, document, photo, diagram, image and spreadsheet you input. Your newspaper will now have a ready system that can instantly analyze the history of your community and provide thorough background research and historical context for new stories, as well as among stories your newspaper has published. Consider allowing consumers to access this archive (the Spark) for a subscription or usage fee.

Remember to always add any new stories to this archive, as well as supporting documents such as reporters’ notes, local police blotters, town zoning and construction permit applications and decisions, local government and school board minutes, births and obituaries, local schools’ sport box scores, and anything else that might support or suggest new stories. Remember, too, that the SLM software can analyze this wealth of current and historical data to find otherwise unknown or unrealized links that lead (i.e., data journalism) to more new stories. I’d also advise inputting into the Spark all wire service, supplementary, and syndicated electronic sources of stories received by the newspaper.

2. The Agency

Great start, but there is one more important step to take. Are there any government agencies, undertakers, hospitals, or other organizations from which your reporters routinely obtain information (such as police blotters, school lunch menus, births and deaths, building permits, real estate sales, etc.)? You can save work for your reports by using the Spark as an electronic repository where those organizations can send that information and to create an electronic squadron of newsroom ‘micro agents’ to retrieve that information from the organizations. Such agents are known as Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI). Give the Spark its own email address (and tell it to verify from Internet Protocol address the sender’s identity before processing the contents to avoid spoofing or fraudulent inputs). If some of those agents can’t be persuaded to send you that information routinely, ask Spark to create ‘agents’ that routinely search and obtain that information from those organizations’ public websites. When asking Spark to do that, have it also alert the appropriate journalist if the agents find certain things (e.g., violent crimes, court verdicts, etc.) of note. (At the time of this writing (May 12, 2026), I’d also suggest editors, even those without tiny supercomputers, utilize programs such as Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Utilizing Google’s web-based supercomputer, this project instructs how any commercial enterprise can launch hundreds of AI ‘agents’ and “ensure control, governance, and security as you scale.”)

3. Start Neighborhooding

Now is the time to start offering individuated services to the people of your community. This can be done as individuated newsletters or by individuating the home page of your newspaper’s website. I suggest first offering individuated newsletters. This requires less programming than does individuating the home page. What contents to offer? Would people who live in specific villages, neighborhoods, developments, or regions of your community like to receive certain types (or all) news and information specifically about where they live? Births, deaths, building permits, crimes, fires, school events, etc. Such hyperlocal news and information (the type your reporters or the supercomputer ‘agents’ collect) doesn’t appear often in your newspaper’s edition because there isn’t always sufficient page space to justify publishing it. But the Spark can create and operate targeted emailed newsletter for each location. Consumers would merely need to provide their email and postal addresses, plus perhaps select from a checklist what types of information they want, which allows Spark to begin building a database of their names, addresses, and interests. Whether to offer such newsletters for free or a subscription fee is up to you. (Note that a free service is much more likely to build a consumer database faster.)

Would your newspaper’s consumers like to see their selections of stories on your newspaper’s home page rather than see the same home page every other visitor sees? There are large numbers of software programs (primarily developed for retails) that can be loaded into the Spark to do that.



4. Bespoke Individuation

You can now also choose to offer bespoke individuation rather simply allowing consumers to select from a checklist of topics. The consumer can make such choices either on a recurring or one-time basis. The consumer merely needs to send the Spark a query by email or you can offer a portal to the Spark on your newspaper’s website). The Spark will analyze and answer the consumer’s request, adding that to its database about that consumer. Using this mechanism, it’s even possible for a consumer to create their own ‘Daily Me’, a totally customized feed of items. Would your consumers be willing to pay a subscription price for that?

5. Bespoke Journalism

You might have noticed that we haven’t yet asked the Spark’s Artificial Intelligence to write any stories. Hundreds of newsrooms and journalism schools around the world are currently experimenting with Artificial Intelligence for that purpose. As a former owner of a daily newspaper and one with some expertise in these new technologies, I’ve been advising editors not yet to have AI systems write stories. The legal liability is still too high. The ‘hallucination’ (i.e., error) rates of AI are still as high as 2 to 3 percent. I believe those will diminish to less than 0.2 percent within three to four years and might become miniscule thereafter.

However, this doesn’t mean that I haven’t been advising newspapers to allow AI to re-rewrite stories in three specific ways:

· Custom Focus: Is a household which receives one of your emailed newsletters the home of a student who plays on a school sports team? The Spark can be programmed to rewrite the game stories received by that household as stories focusing more on that student (e.g., ‘Despite strong work by shooting guard Billy Jones, the Eagleville Eagles lost to the Putnam Falcons 54 to 62’) rather than receive the otherwise generic story about the game.

· Multilingual or Multilocational: because the Spark is capable of translation, a recent immigrant can receive stories in his native languages rather than the local language version. Or perhaps a subscriber wants information about more than one location. For instance, my wife was born abroad and wants to received news not only specifically about here but also about there. A similar example is that I’ve owned a beach house 30 miles (50 km) from where I live and want to receive neighborhood news from both those locations, etc.

· Format: a subscriber can choose to receive news stories rewritten by the Spark in the form of short summaries; another subscriber who has a Ph.D. can receive lengthier stories featuring deep analysis; and a teenager could even receive news stories as comic strip-style illustrations.

Ai doesn’t change the facts of these stories. Moreover, here are three things to keep in mind when offering individuation of contents”

First, the individuation offered need not be total. The concept is not a binary choice between all or no individuation. A spectrum exists. Any editor who wants to ensure that everyone in his community becomes informed that their town has been sold to Albania can program the Spark to ensure everyone in town sees such bulletin-level stories. The editor controls the degree of individuation offered.

Second, yes, offering individuated, rather than only general-interest, products and services will lead to some consumers to enter informational ‘bubbles’ or ‘echo chambers’ in which they choose to receive only information that reinforces their preexisting beliefs and prejudices. That effect already occurs in social media. It is an unfortunate flaw in human behavior. Yet isn’t that a fair price to pay for other consumers receiving more relevant and more engaging selections of contents than they’d ever gotten before? Remember my point above: the degree of individuation offered consumers is up to the editor.

Third, there is no theoretical reason why individuation cannot be offered in print. You might not have realized it, but you’ve probably been receiving mass individuated contents for decades. Every bank, credit card, and utilities statements you receive via postal mail is individuated. Those are printed on digital presses: computerized-controlled giant ink jet printers that print as fast as any newspaper press. However, I think that it is far easier to deliver individuated contents online than by postal mail or newspaper delivery.

  1. Scale Up

As the sheer numbers of consumers receiving your company’s individuated newsletters or individuated home pages increases, and likewise the degree of customization for each, your company’s individuation infrastructure will need to be strengthened and increased. You might need more than one networked Spark. You might need to use Large Language Model (LLM) software rather than the smaller SLM. The main bottleneck against larger scalability will be the media organization’s existing server connecting to the Internet. To process tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of individuated newsletters or archival requests, a Real-Time Data Streaming server (such as using Apache Kafka) might be needed. The technology of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which relies upon multiple rather than a single database will also help. And for very large numbers of consumers, the Spark ultimately will have to be replaced by use of Distributed Cloud Architecture Edge Computing to avoid centralized bottlenecks and delays.

6. Marketers & Advertisers

Although I’ve worked as a journalist and media executive at UPI, Reuters, and News Corp., and have consulted mainly to news organizations, I’ve owned and operated a daily newspaper long enough to know that a significant portion of consumers read newspapers mainly for the advertisements rather than for news. More than 40 years ago, the Newspaper Advertising Bureau reported this was between 35 and 40 percent of readers. Although newspapers have lost much of their advertising business to CraigsList, Monster.com, and other online service, recent surveys nevertheless show that 61 percent of people trust advertisements in newspapers more than they trust ads online, and that printed ads receive a 9 percent response rate compared to online ads (including those in social media).

So, I suggest experimenting with provision of product and service information in those individuated newsletters. See if there is willingness and technical capacity among the community’s retailers for that. Can auto dealers provide the newspaper’s AI with information about their inventories of new and used cars for sale? Or can an AI’s ‘agents’ obtain that information by scraping it from the dealers’ websites? And from other types of businesses, the inventory of houses for sale or rent, apartments, etc. Would any local consumers want to be alerted if a seller drops the prices to what a consumer considers an agreeable price? The local newspaper used to be the central hub of information about products and services in its community for information. Can that situation return? It’s worth an experiment to find out.

The mistake that monks in scriptoria made more than 500 years ago when faced with Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press was that they didn’t themselves purchase and begin operating such presses. They myopically believed that their purpose was to sustain hand production of Bibles and forgot that their actual purpose was to spread ‘The Word of God’. Had they begun using the new technology that was taking away their business, they would still be in that business and perhaps still dominating it. Mass Media executives must avoid a similar mistake in the face of computer-mediated individuation technologies. Utilize the new technologies that your former consumers left you to use. You’ll stay in business much longer.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *