News & Entertainment Never Should Have Married
An unholy union is ending painfully and publicly with CNN losing 90% of its audience.
The media landscape has changed drastically over the past 10 years; still more drastically in the 20 years before that. It is easy for us to forget in the modern age that the printing press was invented practically yesterday. Written language was invented only just before that.
Humankind is a species only a handful of generations off the farm, as it were, and a couple more handfuls of generations from caves and nomadic gathering. Lately, things have been moving a bit…faster.
Those of us old enough to remember a time Before Internet have a distinct before and after frame of reference. Besides paper maps, playing Oregon Trail and the Dewey Decimal System, we can remember a time when newspapers and the nightly news were the all and all.
If you wanted to be informed in 1994, a subscription to the New York Times or the Washington Post could be delivered anywhere in the U.S., and probably the world. News consumers had a whole host of magazines, newspapers, periodicals and publications from which to choose.
The nightly local news was the nightly local news; the local newspaper was the same.