The End of Mass

Stowe Boyd has a good post on hyperlocal that touches on something I've said before: hyperlocal has to be a "fully edged phenomenon," drawing from a variety of the hyperlocal models we've seen so far.

But then Boyd segues into something even better: a discourse on how newspapers simply don't understand that their previous model of being all things to all audiences is permanently broken.

What the newspapers' management fail to understand is the end of mass: people simply do not hold with mass identity now that they are free to find human-scale identity, and once they find it, they will not go back. Newspapers and other mass media is falling first and fastest because we are rejecting the erstatz, mass belonging that they offered, as part of the expansion of the industrial Western democratic ideals. 

Newspapers–and other media–just can't keep following the old playbook of publishing for a general audience. The audience is rejecting that model and wants more specificity—products that are mostly useful to them, not mostly thrown away. (What percentage of the newspaper do you actually read, anyway? What a waste!)

Just as the magazine industry fragmented in the late 1960s and early 1970s from general-interest titles like Life and Look into specialty titles for every audience under the sun, newspapers have to find new ways to target key audiences with focused products. Those audiences may be geographic or they may be demographic. But the era of the large-scale, regional, mass-market newspaper is over, as painfully demonstrated by declining advertising and circulation numbers. 

The sooner newspaper publishers and editors recognize that, and move on to competing in niches within their own markets, the sooner they'll start to pull out of the current death spiral. Mass just doesn't cut it anymore.