Michael Jackson Redux: What Does It All Mean?

Taplin takes the easy way out, throws up his hands about the end of journalism as we know it, and goes for a walk.
His commenters? Not so much.

I have Google maps on my iPhone. It shows me realtime traffic data on any freeway I choose. I don’t even have to ask. It’s just there. Always.
So why on Earth would I ever tune into KCBS with ‘traffic every 15 minutes’, sandwiched in between commercials for dish soap and muffler repair?
That point and more is made here, in an excellent piece on the future of scientific publication by Michael Nielsen. What’s remarkable about his analysis is how well it applies to a broad range of enterprises dominated by pre-internet organizations that were build around tightly controlled flows of information.
Their inability to adapt is not due to stupidity, or arrogance, or greed, or malice. It’s because they were optimized for a world that’s vanishing rapidly, and that the amount of pain they’d have to suffer in order to transform themselves is more than enough to kill them outright. Consequently, decisive advantage falls to those with the greatest of all assets – a blank slate.
The bottom like is that whatever you think of the MSM is going to matter very little in the coming years, because they are already toast. The culture, the people, the organizations, everything. It’s going to be gone in very short order.
And my suspicion is that the people who can do the best job visualizing data, and providing humans with dynamic maps (especially of abstract things like economic variations and fluctuations in levels of political influence) will become the new news.
I suspect that a lot of the MSM’s fascination with the MJ story isn’t just a function of the hive-mind. It’s also the realization that his heyday and theirs were very closely aligned, and that they both owed the power enjoyed at their respective peaks to the same underlying conditions.
It’s like a last hurrah. In the same way they won’t get another star this big, they probably won’t ever get a chance to publish an obit like this one either.
Moving on.