Spin Prophet? Guccione Jr. speaks

Founder of Spin magazine, Bob Guccioni Jr., the son of the Penthouse founder, knows the media business from the inside. So his predictions, recently listed in a Huffington Post blog titled "The Future of Media: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying that the Internet will consume Print" are worth taking a look at.

There are four main predictions he lists in this article, and I can see all of them happening at some point. But if I had to guess which one will definitely happen: a cable channel will almost certainly pass one of the big four networks, if only because the best programming is on cable today. It's just a matter of time. If I were forced to disagree with one of predictions, however, it might as well be the one where he says the Internet will not consume print, because "it's not strong enough, its not better, and its too busy consuming itself."

One thing I've noticed over 12 years of writing for an audience of between 45-60,000 is that, by and large, younger generations coming up do not read, nor are they particularly interested in critical thinking or challenging the status quo.
Like cattle, they've been fattened on video, raised since birth in a highly stimulating visual world of TV and computers. Maybe the relatively new medical condition known as ADD is simply the phenomenon that occurs when you take a person used to quick moving images, and place them in front of another human speaking. Usually the speaker is too slow, the ADD mind too fast, or unfocused, or both.

Not only will print have a harder time paying the bills, but (sadly) I think it will almost completely lose sight of its fundamental journalism goals out of financial necessity.
There simply won't be any readers left. We are clearly moving back to more of an oral culture. But video trumps the printed word. Not to mention that most people now prefer the speed and ability to skip through stories at their own pace--taking them in bits or pieces rather than whole. It's impossible to compete once the brain has been trained to receive information in short quick blasts. Non-stop advertising has also played a role in training us this way.

Magazines and weeklies will probably fare better than traditional daily newspapers, unless they can, as Guccione suggests, get truly creative and find not only ways to make their papers more visually exciting, but also get creative in content, and provide useful information in a timely manner that the Internet cannot.