Responding to a Roger Simon report that cable news is losing viewers, Glenn Reynolds observes,
I used to be a cable-news junkie. Now I get most of my news from the Internet. I wonder if a lot of other people have made the same shift?
Could be. Outside particularly captivating events, there’s a finite appetite for news. Clearly, more people are reading news on the Internet, especially weblogs which have grown from essentially nothing a couple years ago to, well, something at least. Broadband access is rapidly becoming a necessity and people increasingly expect to be connected 24/7. The bite has to come from somewhere.
If it weren’t for TiVo, I’d hardly watch television at all. A side effect of the Internet is that my patience for sitting through information being fed to me is dwindling. I want to be able to skip stories that don’t interest me and get right to the information I want. This applies beyond news programming, even. For example, I once again “watch” Saturday Night Live, usually some time Sunday. I watch the opening skit and then fast forward until I hit either a political/pop culture satire skit or Weekend Update. I then fast forward until I hit either another political/pop culture satire skit or the end of the show. I now “watch” all of the major Sunday morning talk shows, but skip through the boring parts. If the same talking head is doing all the shows, I skip him after the first show. But I get to see all the roundtable discussions this way, and that’s usually the part I most enjoy. Indeed, even This Week is worth the effort if you skip through the lousy parts, since the show is reduced to fifteen minutes.
Clearly, television is going to have to adapt to this new consciousness to survive. With more channels drawing fewer viewers, competition is stiff. The old business model, where people were just happy to get to see anything that happened to come on, is dead. It hasn’t really been replaced with anything yet.
Update: Spoons has some thoughts on this as well.
