Know Who Has Steered the Mass Media Industries Into Catastrophe

Craven are those who shun responsibility for formulating and sustaining the disastrous strategy that during the past 20 years has led the Mass Media industries to financial catastrophe and caused literally billions of people worldwide to abandon routine usage of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations as the predominant means by which consumers obtain news, entertainment, and other information.

I accuse the ‘digital’ executives of the Mass Media industries (including notably those who decades ago were celebrated by their industries as ‘New Media Pioneers’) of being directly culpable for the titanic financial shipwreck and very doom of their industries.

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

Although you might nowadays hear many people who work below the corporate suites in Mass Media industries—workers who virtually all have no experience or formal training in the strategic management of their industries, glibly blame their industries’ financial woes and lost audiences on convenient bogeymen such as corporate media chain ownership, equity market quarterly earnings pressures, avaricious hedge funds, social media, search engines, or even consumers themselves (who they say ’have become habituated not to pay for online contents’, the real culprits who caused the industries’ catastrophe are the industries’ own digital executives whose very responsibility was to cause the opposite results. I herein indict them.

During the mid-1990s, these new media pioneers and digital executives volunteered or were assigned to formulate their industries’ adaptation strategy to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the world’s media environment. The gist of what they formulated was that their companies would launch websites that act as the equivalents of their companies’ printed editions or broadcast services. Publishers’ webpages would become the online analogue of their printed story pages; broadcasters’ webpages would become the online transmitters of live broadcasts and the on-demand repositories of the previously broadcast.

The strategy assumed that consumers and advertisers would use the websites the same ways (e.g., as frequently, thoroughly) as consumers and advertisers had used the printed products or broadcast services, and thus that the tradition business models of printed editions and broadcast services would work successfully online.

Although not a goal or benchmark within it, the strategy speculated that if ever enough consumers abandoned usage of print or broadcast for online, then perhaps the Mass Media industries could begin operating only online. Publishers thereby could eliminate the expenses of purchasing, printing, and distributing paper products and broadcasters could eliminate the regulatory hassles and expenses of operating transmitters in public airwaves, having to pay for cable or satellite signal carriage, and having to split advertising revenue with local affiliates. The Mass Media industries might thus in the 21^st Century generate even greater net revenues operating only online than the industries had ever generated in the 20^th Century from print or broadcast.

From the perspective of the mid-1990s, the simplistic assumptions upon which this strategy was based appeared to make sense. This was when going online meant plugging your home telephone landline into a 600- or 1200-baud modem that operated slower than 0.0012-megabytes per second. Because th0se lethargic speeds permitted little more than alphanumeric texts and still photographs to be shoveled online, newspapers and magazines became the firsts to implement the strategy. And as home bandwidths increased later that decade, radio broadcasters shoveled their audio signals into online. And when by 2006 nearly half of homes in developed nations had gained basic broadband access (i.e., speeds up to 1.5-megabytes per second), television networks and stations implemented this ‘Shovelware Strategy’.

Twenty years ago, 2006 was a halcyon year for Mass Media industries. Their printed products and broadcast services set record revenues and net profits, as well as achieved their largest readerships, listenerships, and viewerships. There was now sufficient home bandwidth that all sectors of the industries could converge online; each competing directly with the others by offering full multimedia and not just their own traditional form. Every sector had implemented the Shovelware Strategy and the number of consumers using the Internet had surpassed one billion worldwide. All those factors should have meant that the Shovelware Strategy, its implementation phase over, now entered its mature phase during which its expected profits would be reaped.

By 2007, however, empirical evidence began appearing that clearly indicated consumers and advertisers were NOT using the websites the same ways they had used the printed editions or broadcast services; that the traditional business models of print and broadcast, which had been transplanted online, were NOT generating anywhere near the revenues expected; and that increasingly billions of consumers were abandoning routine usage of the Mass Media industries’ in printed, broadcast, and online and have instead begun routinely the online services of previously unknown companies as their predominant means of obtaining news, entertainment, and other information.

Although I can cite mountains of empirical evidence from all sectors of the Mass Media industries that the Shovelware Strategy was failing each, consider just the U.S. newspaper industry, the largest newspaper market in the world. During the past 20 years, U.S. newspapers, the sector of Mass Media to have used the Shovelware Strategy longest has lost approximately 70 percent of its readerships, advertising clientele, and annual revenues. (The U.S. magazine industry has suffered similarly grave losses.) The empirical evidence against the Shovelware Strategy has never stopped mounting. The strategies’ anticipated level of revenues been achieved. Most of the 6.2 billion consumers worldwide (74 percent of the world’s population) who now use the Internet have abandoned routine usage of the Mass Media industries’ websites and instead they routinely use the online services of the new companies I’ll describe below.

Despite more than 20 years of its usage (30 years in the case of the newspaper and magazine sectors), the digital executives’ persistence in the Shovelware Strategy resulted in the opposite of what it was formulated to do: Consumers and advertisers didn’t use it as contemplated. Its business model failed to generate the revenues anticipated. Indeed, it abjectly failed to compensate the Mass Media industries for the revenues lost when consumers abandoned their printed products and broadcast services, resulting enormous losses of audiences, advertisers, and operating funds. Yet the industries’ digital executives obtusely persist in pursuing this demonstrably calamitous strategy.

You don’t need to have taught postgraduate New Media Management courses for 15 years, as I have, to realize that continuing to pursue so obviously disastrous a strategy for more than 20 years begs pointed questions about the business acumen and leadership of these digital executives and their overlords. Reasonably intelligent businesspeople would have objectively examined the empirical evidence, declared the Shovelware Strategy to be a failure, and at least ten years ago have formulated an alternative in a new direction and that also can repair the damage done.

Before I outline why the Shovelware Strategy was doomed to fail, permit me one justifiably pointed question about these digital executives’ perceptions. They were all aware of the technological observation coined in 1964 and known as ‘Moore’s Law’. It notes that the power, capabilities, and inexpensiveness of computation technologies has been doubling every two years since circa 1900. Between 1994 when the Shovelware Strategy was first implemented and 2006, that means the capabilities of computer-mediated technologies advanced by a factor of 64 (i.e., 2⁶), which is a significant number. But the difference between 1994 and 2026 is advancement by a factor of 65,536 (2¹⁶), which is gargantuan number. So, I don’t think I’m in error mathematically or logically, or being hyperbolic, when I state that the Mass Media industries’ mid-1990s Shovelware Strategy is now than a thousand times (i.e., 100,000 percent!) outdated and obsolete, and has been wholly upended by technological advancements that occurred since its formulation. Why were the Mass Media industries’ digital executives of the mid-1990s, 2006, or 2026, who knew Moore’s Law, so obtuse or torpid to assume this strategy could perennially persist without end or huge revisions?

What ultimately doomed the Mass Media industries were remarkable technological advancements that arose after the Shovelware Strategy was implemented and, despite forewarnings, that the industries’ digital executives ignored or failed to perceive and grasp. They from 1994 through 2006 had been focused on bandwidth speeds because they needed to be fast enough for converged multimedia. However, most of Moore’s Law’s exponential advancements weren’t about delivery speeds but processor capabilities, particularly server processors. If you’re looking for a visually tangible example of the results of Moore’s Law, my May 12th newsletter will show you one, a $5,000, book-sized, desktop supercomputer with the power of IBM’s $33 million Roadrunner supercomputer which in 2008 was the most powerful computer in the world.

The more than thousand-fold (2¹⁶), advances in Moore’s Law since the mid-1990s have wrought monumental advances in informational identification, aggregation, sorting, and user targeting processing capabilities. Those serverside advancements have been brilliantly exploited by startup enterprises such as the search engines (Google, Baidu, Bing, Yandex, etc.), social media websites (Facebook, X, Sina Weibo, Vkontakte, TikTok, etc.), and other algorithmic recommendation engines (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Pandora, Douyin, etc.). Many of those startup companies weren’t initially founded as media companies but became such when they analyzed how consumers were using their services online.

They became phenomenally popular and successful because during the past 20 years consumers discovered that by using these search engines, social media, or other algorithmic recommendation engines, each of those consumers could obtain a feed of news, entertainment, and other information that much better matches that individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media product or service or practical combinations thereof. Likewise, hundreds of millions of marketers discovered that these services can better target advertisements to those individuals than can the Mass Media industries. As results, these startup enterprises became among the fastest growing companies in world history and are nowadays used weekly, if not daily, by virtually all 6.2 billion people who use the Internet.

In my March 10^th newsletter, I detailed how these companies did that and why the Mass Media industries can’t (don’t). The basics are that although the defining characteristics of the eponymous Mass Media are mass production and mass reach, the search engines, social media services, and other algorithmic recommendation engines, add the new dimension of simultaneous mass customization. None of the forms of media that arose from the analogue production technologies of the waning Industrial Era can do that. It is a capability entirely arising from the computer-mediated production technologies of the dawning Informational Era. By not utilizing this remarkable new capability and instead simply shoveling their legacy products and services online, the Mass Media industries are, in effect, inadvertently transplanting their legacy two-dimensional products and services into newly three-dimensional media. Therefore, is it any wonder that instead most of the world’s 6.12 billion Internet consumers are using these new enterprises’ services rather than the websites of the Mass Media industries?

Because these new enterprises’ services add an entirely new dimension to media; are entirely based upon digital, rather than analog, production technologies; have become phenomenally successful popularly and financially; have just as rapidly eviscerated the Mass Media industries that preceded them; and have done so during the changeover from the Industrial to Informational eras, that I consider them to be a new genus of media, which in media management academic conferences and my classrooms are being categorically called Individuated Media. All of these new enterprises that collectively form Individuated Media are still rather nascent and will greatly change (i.e., advance) as the century progresses, but their effects on the media landscape have already become epochal.

During the late-1990s, media theorists, such as MIT Media Lab Founder Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 book Being Digital and Roger Fidler, the former director of New Media Development for Knight-Ridder newspaper chain in the U.S. and one of the initial formulators of the Shovelware Strategy, in his 1997 book Mediamorphosis, predicted the capabilities for media mass customization would probably become possible sometime around the first decade of the 21st Century. Most Mass Media industries’ digital executives apparently couldn’t have cared less. They initially dismissed these new companies’ Individuated Media services as, at most, somehow auxiliary or adjunct to Mass Media websites: just sites helpful for finding or discussing Mass Media contents. They failed to perceive that offering consumers a third dimension (mass customization) in media, rather than just the Industrial Era’s previous two (mass production and mass reach) was an epochal advance or competition that threated their industries. That was unfortunate because surveys in recent years indicated that 6.12 billion consumers now routinely use these Individuated Media companies’ services, rather than the Mass Media industries’ websites, as those consumers primary means to obtain news, entertainment, and other information.

I believe that 2026 can be a momentous year for the Mass Media industries if only the digital executive zombies in it awake. If they are rational businesspeople, they will objectively admit the overwhelming empirical evidence that their Shovelware Strategy and work together to formulate anew based upon the new dimension in media before a growing number of Mass Media companies go out-of-business. My May 12^th newsletter detailed how even a small Mass Media company can begin individuating its services.

And doing so this year is even more direly needed due to the latest advancements in Moore’s Law: Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is likely the year in which the ever-accelerating advances in computational technologies will make Moore’s Law itself obsolete. The Government of the United Kingdom’s AI Security Institute reported this month that doubling of Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities are now occurring every 4.7 months, rather than every 24 months as observed by Moore’s Law. As accelerating advances ever shorten the time between doubling of capabilities, the acceleration starts to become tetrationial rather than merely exponential. A doubling of computational power every 4.7 months means a more than thousand-fold increase in Artificial Intelligence’s already astounding capabilities by 2030.

Widespread adoption of AI in search engine services has already markedly reduced the numbers of online users who visit the Mass Media industries websites from those search engines. Moreover, widespread usage of Agentic Artificial Intelligence by consumers themselves has begun. Several recent surveys agree that more than 2.4 billion people (i.e., 30 percent of the world’s population) have already used some form of AI, and that 900 million use it weekly. A survey this year by Capgemini shows that 63 percent of American consumers actively seek ‘hyper-personalized’ contents through Agentic AI and similar AI tools.

Although hundreds of AI experiments are underway within the Mass Media industries and media schools, virtually all focus on using AI either to write stories or fabricate videos rather than on the more obvious and lucrative purpose of using Ai to further satisfy the massive demand by consumers to receive individuated feeds of news, entertainment, and other information. The Individuated Media companies themselves aren’t making that shortsighted mistake. The worldwide rise of AI usage will inevitably make the Shovelware Strategy deader than the tombstones marking all the Mass Media industries that will have needlessly died continuing to pursue that strategy.

Am I rash, hyperbolic, or unhinged to state that the Mass Media industries are being destroyed by their digital executives’ continuing adherence to an obsolete strategy? No, I’m confident that the overwhelming empirical evidence and disastrous financial results objectively validate what I state. I’m merely point out the nakedness of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’.

I had hoped that some among those digital executives would by now have demonstrated the perspicuity and leadership to have stated all this. I had likewise expected that some of the surviving New Media Pioneers (perhaps in their retirements?) might have stated all this by now. I’ve heard only silences.

If the Mass Media industries’ want to survive well into the next three quarters of this century, they direly need to find new leadership, change their online strategy, and adapt to demonstrably manifest the 21^st Century media megatrends of individuation and AI.

Should anyone publicly dispute what I’ve written, I look forward to debating these issues with them at a media industry conferences. If upon reading this you would like to dispute any or all of this in a smaller forum, please feel free to do so in the Comments section. Constructive criticism is positive even when an accusation is negative.

Part 3 of 4: The True Online Strategy for the Mass Media

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 20^th Century needed at least one technician called a pressman to operate that device. During the 21^st 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.

6. 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.

The Time Has Come to Abandon Shovelware Strategy. What to Do Instead.

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to post to all its free subscribers the entire contents of what I’d normally provide only to my paying subscribers. In fact, this is the first time that I’ve ever freely imparted teaching and he paid quintessence of what I’ve learned during my past 33 years full-time advising the Mass Media industries how to adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies into the media environment.

Why do I give away information that I can sell? For two reasons that together make 2026 a momentous year for the future of those industries.

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

My first and foremost reason is ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. A profanely naked fact is that the Mass Media 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 21^st 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.

I’ve Revamped and Rebranded the Digital Deliverance newsletter to Focus on What has Already Superseded the Mass Media as Consumers’ Predominant Way of Obtaining News, Entertainment, and Other information.

As old dogs such as me get older, we sometimes forget the new tricks we had learned.

“You’re publishing a newsletter to teach media executives the lessons that you taught in graduate school? Won’t this confuse people who instead expect a newsletter that comments about news and current events in the media industries? Moreover, you’ve devoted the past 20 years your life to recognizing the rise of Individuated Media. So, why not call it that rather than brand it with the name of your 30-year-old consulting company.”

So, welcome to the Individuated Media newsletter (formerly Digital Deliverance newsletter). I’ve revamped and rebranded it. The many lessons I wrote and taught in my required course for New Media Management master’s degree students (an elective for doctoral candidates) at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, I’m instead converting to podcasts and videos for this newsletter’s paying subscribers—a better way to differentiate what they get from what free subscribers receive.

I’ve increased this newsletter’s frequency to more than weekly. And I’ve also changed its tone. I had been these past years publishing academic publications such the International Journal of New Media Studies, the Nordic Journal of Media Management, the Journal of Strategic Innovation and Sustainability, etc., rather than media industry trade journals. Academic writing is virtually required to be bulletproof and concrete, particularly because any dissident or non-conformist articles get attacked by the hidebound or philistine. Yet that can tend to make academic writing sometimes as heavy and ineffective as the Maginot Line. My career started 50 years ago in journalism, in which writing should be short and snappy, particularly in a newsletter. Here we go!

I’ve a reputation of not taking prisoners at conferences, symposia, and seminars about ‘New Media’. I’d rather immediately kill a faulty idea or unsound strategy than let those go viral. However, I regret that wasn’t faithful to that hygienic practice during an online journalism conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts 20 years ago. The result is that I’m today writing about a misguided strategy that has cancerously metastasized since.

In my opening remarks as that day’s co-moderator of the conference, I warned against the Mass Media industries pursuing a strategy that I’ll now outline below. Unfortunately for conference attendees, my co-moderator subsequent opening remarks started with “Forget all of what Vin has said. That doesn’t matter. Do what [journalism] you do best and [hyper]link to the rest.” I thought that was crudely impolite and unprofessional. I should have immediately disputed him publicly, but I saw that most attendees preferred his simplistic fantasy for online success.

• What follows are the results.

For more than 30 years, they have myopically misperceived how the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies has transformed the world’s media environment. The empirical evidence and verifiable data proving my statement is gargantuan and blatantly inescapable.

The Mass Media industries first encountered those technologies during the 1990s (let’s forget the proprietary online services, videotext, and teletext years, although we can certainly include those, too). It was a time when consumers’ access to online required them to plug their wired telephone line into a modem.

• For what purpose would these industries use the technologies?

They fundamentally mistook the technologies as ways to create online versions of their printed products or broadcast services. A website became equivalent to a periodical’s edition. Its webpages to printed pages. Printed ‘right-on-page’ (‘ROP’) advertisements became banner ads. For the broadcaster, the website became the online source of recorded video clips or the live ‘stream’ of that station or network. Etcetera.

Virtually all sectors of the Mass Media industries were so confident that online could be the ‘digital’ equivalent of their printed products or broadcast services that they also believed that their traditional business models of those products and services could simply be transplanted and succeed there.

The publishers hoped that online would eliminate their costs of purchasing, printing, and distributing paper products. The broadcasters hoped that online would eliminate their costs and regulatory hassles of operating transmitter or dealing with cable or satellite system intermediaries to reach consumers. The Mass Media industries believed that online might eventually generate annual net revenues equal or greater than what their printed products or broadcast services had previously generated.

Those were the goals and practices for online that the Mass Media industries set in the mid-1990s.

• In my graduate school teachings, I referred to this as the ‘Shovelware Strategy’.

The Mass Media industries thought what was needed for this to succeed was that consumers acquire sufficiently fast online access so that the industries could deliver to them texts, still photos, graphical page layouts, animations, audio, and video simultaneously, and without monopolizing consumers’ home telephone lines. The industries termed this ‘convergence’ because all the industries’ sectors would become capable of multimedia and compete in ways they previously couldn’t.

They achieved that situation starting in circa 2005 when approximately half of the households and businesses in developed nations had acquired ‘always-on’ broadband Internet access. Consumers had become ‘hooked-up’, ‘wired’, and everything seemed to become ‘digital’.

The Mass Media industries’ executives who implemented the Shovelware Strategy were lauded as ‘New Media Pioneers’; promoted into their corporate suites; or retired on their pensions and laurels.

The Mass Media industries, particularly those run by executives inculcated in the concept of three-to-five-year business plans, settled back in what they then believed would be the Shovelware Strategy’s start of a ‘Mature’ phase during which net profits would start growing.

• The Reality.

Yet as billions of consumers worldwide shifted media consumption habits away from print and broadcast and to online, the Shovelware Strategy incontrovertible failed.

Rather than continue to use the Mass Media industries’ websites, those billions of consumers, as well as the advertisers attracted to them, chose to use the online services of ‘search engines’, ‘social media’, and other innovative startup companies that provided each of those consumers with an individualized mix of news, entertainment, and other information that better match each of those individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media company’s products, services, or feed can. Billions of consumers chose to use the websites of companies that produced Individuated Media rather than the websites of the Mass Media industries.

In the March 19th edition of this newsletter this year, I showed how empirical data in 2007 demonstrated that the Shovelware Strategy wasn’t working. And I explained in the March 10th edition how Individuated Media came to supersede Mass Media as the predominant means by which most of the world’s consumers now obtain news, entertainment, and other information. No need to explain those further now.

The overall results of the Shoveware Strategy are that the Mass Media industries worldwide have lost literally hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenues during the past 20 years of applying the Shovelware Strategy. For example, the U.S. daily newspaper industry’s annual revenues have declined from US$44 billion to less than $18 billion during that period, an aggregate loss of more than $600 billion. During these disastrous 20 years, the Shovelware Strategy has generated merely $3 billion in annual revenues, with stagnant growth during the past decade.

The results of the Shovelware Strategy have been so bad that in less than three weeks, the 250-year old Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, once one of the 25 largest daily newspapers in the U.S., will cease publishing print and online.

As for the remaining 24 largest daily newspapers, during 2025 they lost an average of 13.3-percent of their remaining print edition circulation, ranging from 21.2-percent at The Washington Post to 5.3-percent at the Bridgeport Connecticut Post. (I note that while the Bridgeport newspaper now has the 24th largest circulation among the remaining approximately 1,100 daily newspapers in the U.S., its print circulation is merely 34,000.)

Such declines are only a U.S. phenomenon. Click here to see a chart of the circulation declines of the national newspapers published by Reach Plc (former Trinity Mirror), one of the largest publishers of newspapers in the U.K.

• My Dare

I publicly challenge any Mass Media industry executive to dispute that what I’ve written above means that they are zombies. (I don’t care how senior the executive nor how cushy his corporate accounterments are.)

Why specifically are executives of the Mass Media industries the walking dead?

Because intelligent businesspeople abandon failed strategies; discern what caused the failure; then devise and implement a new strategy that corrects that failure. Permit me to state a frank truth: braindead businesspeople don’t.

The first empirical evidence of the Shovelware Strategy’s failure surfaced nearly 20 years ago. Since then, it has failed to produce what the Mass Media industries hoped it would. What nowadays are Mass Media executives waiting for? Another nearly 20 years to pass? The concrete results of the strategy’s failure clearly indicate that their businesses will cease to exist by then. What the executives of the Mass Media industries are nowadays doing is staggering in a zombie-like coma towards their industries’ doom.

In the next newsletter, which I plan to send later this week, I’ll begin detailing the solution for these industries. It’s the sum of what I know after working in the media industries for 47 years, of which 32 years were consulting on five continents and teaching at the postgraduate level about how the Mass Media industries should adapt to the introduction of personal computer-mediated technologies worldwide. It is an integrated, multimedia, multinational, and Open Source solution how to transact, track, and invoice the usage of every type and form of contents, so that each individual consumer received a unique feed of news, entertainment, and other information, that better matches his or her individual mix of needs, interests, and tastes, than can any Mass Media industries’ products or service. You might be surprised to learn that most media’s major usage of Artificial Intelligence won’t be in newsrooms or to create contents.

What it will require is a change in paradigm from the Industrial Era’s Mass Media theories, doctrines, practices, and contents packaging. I’ll end this newsletter edition with a similar example of such a paradigm shift:

When Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the moveable-type press created the Mass Media, the monks in scriptoria, who laboriously hand-copied books, view that new technology as an existential threat and considered Gutenberg’s machine profane. Yet during the subsequent few decades they couldn’t compete with it. So, their employment and industry ended.

What those monks should have done is purchase one of Gutenberg’s presses. Although they wouldn’t have been able to print the magnificently illustrated Bibles they formerly produced, each of which took months or years to produce, a press would have enabled them to produce hundreds of basic Bibles in that same time. The error the monks in the scriptoria made was they thought their purpose was to produce magnificently illustrated Bibles for the few when in reality their purpose was to spread the ‘word of God’ to all.

Nowadays, I deal with mobs of media executives and old-fashioned content creators who zombie-like believe their purpose is to produce and package news, entertainment, and other information, in virtually the ways that their predecessors in previous centuries did. They fail to realize that their real purpose is to use the best possible technologies to deliver whatever mix of contents will best satisfy each individual consumers needs, interests, and tastes.

That is also the most lucrative path to success.

Leave a comment

Share The Individuated Media newsletter

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