The Future of Media Content

This morning @Armano pointed Twitterville to this Ad Age post from Bob Garfield, which talks of an apocalyptic future for media. For awhile now I've become more and more convinced that what we're seeing in the world of media is a de-duping process. One that will eventually reach its logical end.

Why does my local paper and local news cover national news? Why do they cover sports? And weather? And such. The simple answer is that in the pre-Internet, digital days, they had too. Otherwise I had to subscribe to lots of hard copies of content to get all my news. But this has led to duplication of effort.

And who is feeling this pain? Local newspapers, etc.

I think in the future and by future I mean like in a couple of years maybe - we'll look to content providers by content type not delivery channel. So for local news I might look to WWL (my local CBS affiliate) or the Times Picayune (my local paper) but for sports I'll turn to ESPN -- including local sports and for weather, maybe Accuweather.com. And so on and so on. These information streams will come to me via an RSS reader like Google Reader or Netvibes or I'll be able to have them delivered to my printer or email via services like HP's Tabbloid (which I love by the way).

In the future, he who duplicates dies I think. I just don't have time to wade through duplication in search of new information. So I'll let the Internet do that for me.

So what do y'all think?