Rhonabwy

The conventional news vendors – newspapers and local television – are failing badly. They’re taking a lot of damage, and the worst part is that it’s entirely self inflicted.

Karen pointed out something that I thought was a great indicator – last weekend there was a convention in Seattle that brought in 9000+ visitors, and there wasn’t a peep about it in the news: Sakura-Con. Granted it’s a bit fringe – it’s all about Anime – but you’d think that with 9000 people attending that maybe SOMEONE would have covered it in the local news.

Not a thing.

The whole reason that news media is failing is because it isn’t reporting anything relevant. Most news is about the world – and we can get that in increasing venues incredibly easily. Everyone has the world news. So very, very few news outlets have realized it’s the local community, not the world, that’s critical to their lifeblood.

KOMO 4 TV (Fisher News) recently annihilated their entire internet focused staff with the recent economic downturn. <SARCASM ALERT>Talk about forward looking… </SARCASM> That’s just rock fucking stupid on a whole new level.

The news companies are going to go under, and rightfully so, unless they start to wake up and realize they need to do business a whole new way. They won’t have the US Govt standing there to bail them out like the US Automakers either (another fine example of rock-fucking-stupid and self-inflicted damage).

(By the way – notice these stilt walkers? Pretty cool work. Apparently took them 2 years of their own RD to work it out. They walked up the escalators with those!)