yelvington.com

I've been noodling on a list of megatrends that present megachallenges for newspapers. What am I missing?

• Fractured marketplace. We don't have an audience any more; we have lots of little audiences, and some of them are really different. You can see part of that in the generational media usage changes that are killing print circulation. But it's not just that. We have wired oldsters who have no use for the tree-killing stock listings, and unwired oldsters who go ballistic if we remove the stock listings. Many people have digital cable with sophisticated set-top boxes and/or Tivo; they have no use for TV listings in print. Early adopters vs. luddites. Political liberals vs. conservatives. Feminists vs. big hair. Not only can you not please everybody, it's becoming damned hard to please anybody.
• Info-elite moves to the Web. People who actually care about the news (and that's a shrinking percentage of the total) are finding the Internet a rich source of satisfaction. They're not necessarily getting that satisfaction from newspaper websites. The best customers are finding other information sources.
• Word of mouth becomes stronger than the press. The net has shifted the balance of power. Gatekeeping is dead. There's an adage that says you should never get in an argument with somebody who buys ink by the barrel, but the net has given everyone a publishing platform. When we make a mistake, we get our tails kicked, hard, in public, by the public (Dan Rather).
• Backlash against authoritarianism. Traditional media have tried to be "authoritative" but it's come across as authoritarian, and many people have resented that for a long time. Now it's payback. And that feeling is being inflamed by crass manipulators -- sometimes politically motivated (the right-wing campaign against "liberal media") and sometimes personally motivated (bloggers campaigning against "big media").
• An explosion of microcasting. Everybody's living out there in the long tail of the demand curve. One site indexes 30,000 podcasts. Icerocket indexes 10 million blogs; BlogHerald claims there are 100 million out there. Much of this is fed by personal passion and not by capitalism (see Creative Commons, open-source software, etc.) All of this subtracts time/attention from traditional media.
• The end of local/life in Generica. It's getting so you can't tell one community from another; Wal-Mart, Best Buy, TGI Friday's and Chile's and all the same fast-food joints have crowded out what makes a place unique. That, and migration/mobility, are eroding the value of local news, which is the one remaining major asset of local newspapers.

There have to be more big ones; what am I missing? I suppose I could mention "ourselves."