In the not-so-distant future, there won't be any hard-copy newspapers. The latest findings from Gallup about news consumption show that the only winners in the news biz these days are cable news and the Internet--both of them appearing on screens, albeit different screens, typically.
OK, so news consumers will get their news from a screen. What sort of screen? Put it this way: it won't matter, because they'll all do everything. Right now, my big screen TV is a Dell--and while I haven't figured out exactly how yet, I can use that screen as a computer screen. Convergence!
In that sort of environment, the announcements that Politico is now a) offering a wire service, and b) teaming up with Reuters is interesting. The Politico is nominally a newspaper, and it still distributes freebie copies all over the place in DC, but all my Beltway friends tell me that it is really an online publication--that's where everyone reads it. So the hard copy of the paper was a sort of benign Trojan Horse--just a way to help Politico gain "street cred," as it were, to compete with AP and all the other old-line wire services.
The Cable Gamer wishes Politico well--it's a lively and interesting product, without the obvious preachy liberal bias of, say, AP. (Although it is an ominous sign that Politico is teaming up with Reuters.)
And of course, if screens are the new medium--as opposed to hard copy--then it will be incumbent on all the screen operators to make the best product possible. Will the new screen just be print and maybe a picture or two? Of course not. The news screens of the future will be alive with movement, color, graphics, video--anything that people can think of to make the news more compelling. It will be an exciting time for Cable Gamers and for all news junkies.
At that point, I will probably change the name of this blog to The Convergence Game!
But of course, there are plenty of technical issues to be wrangled along the way. We can all have screens, and content providers can be "agnostic across platforms"--to use some jargon concerning the indistinguishability of TV, computers, cell phones, etc.--but there's still the issue of getting the content from the provider to the consumer.
Broadly speaking, content moves through "pipelines," which are either fiber optic, or wireless (through the air)--anything but an actual pipeline.
And so the question of who controls those pipelines--who builds them, who profits from them, who regulates them--is about as important as anything in the 21st century US economy. Control of the pipelines tomorrow is as important as control of the roads today, or control of the railroads yesterday.
TCG can remember, many years ago, reading The Octopus, a 1901 novel by muckraker Frank Norris, in which the railroads were portrayed as the bad guys. The issue was, at bottom, simple: if the railroads had a monopoly on transport, they could rip off farmers and others who needed transportation to survive. So do the pipeline owners--Verizon, AT&T, Comcast--play a similar role today? Not really, because the telcos and cable companies are heavily regulated--they are legally prohibited from playing favorites, in terms of, say, letting one category of traffic go faster than another. That's "net neutrality."
Indeed, some might ask, "Is the government, and all its regulations and red tape--is that the new octopus?" And that's an interesting question--the federal government being 10 times the size, as a percentage of GDP, as it was in Frank Norris' day.
But in the meantime, the picture grows ever more complicated: According to the Journal this morning, big Net companies, including Microsoft and Google, are losing interest in net neutrality, as they seek to carve out better deals for themselves. They say that they are doing this in the name of serving customers better.
We shall see.
What we will also see, again and again, is a revisitation of the oldest questions concerning the allocation of scarce commodities--and yes, even the Internet is a scarce commodity, especially at "fat pipe" speeds.
